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Writer's pictureKelsea Jones

Faculty OER Guide

Updated: Nov 13, 2019

The field of Open Education Resources is growing and expanding every day. Below is a curated list of some of what's available today. This list has been adapted by Kelsea Jones from Teaching With Open Education Resources by Christina Trunnell (CC-BY).

Open Textbooks

  • Open Textbook Library: Hundreds of complete, open college-level textbooks.

  • Open Stax: Rice Connexions is providing peer reviewed, quality open textbooks. There are some amazing textbooks available here, but some are still in production.

  • BC OpenEd a curated collection of open textbooks, many reviewed by British Columbia faculty.

  • Wikibooks: A project of the Wikimedia Foundation, this collection of group written textbooks in a variety of sources follows rules similar to Wikipedia.

  • Project Gutenberg: Find the full text of classics and public domain works from the first massive ebook creating organization in existence. Nothing fancy here, just files with the full text.

Open Courses

  • Open Course Library: The WA Open Course Library project offers 81 of Washington's most enrolled courses. There are a lot of great readings in these course files. Great community college content

  • Saylor.org: Saylor offers full courses online. It can be really helpful to use the reading lists from Saylor to find and organize your courses.

  • LearningSpace from Open University: All of the learning materials presented on this site are CC licensed, but don't confuse "Learning Spaces" with the full Open University- their licensing/copyrights are different.

  • Bridge to Success: Materials, mostly study skills, to support students transitioning to college.

  • Open Courseware: An independent search engine that indexes open education classes from places like MIT, Yale and UMass.

  • Academic Earth: Find lectures and videos from some of the most respected instructors in the world.

  • OCW Utah: Open education course materials created by the University of Utah.

Large Repositories

  • OER Commons: This resource seeks to collect and distribute a variety of OER at a variety of levels and subjects.

  • Free: The mission of Free is to make the learning resources of the US Government easier to find. There are over 1500 lessons, objects, and tools for teaching from the federal government located here.

  • Open Scout:UK based database of business skills teaching resources. Includes articles, tutorials, video and much more in a variety of languages.

  • Merlot: This repository is one of the biggest and more famous places to find and share teaching resources.

  • AMSER: Materials in the Applied Math and Science Educational Repository are free for use and adaptation. Most resources are at the high school and community college levels.

  • Open Culture: This blog formatted repository seeks to bring together free resources on culture and education. The list of movies here is impressive.

  • Edsitement!: Learning objects and lessons from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It offers a large collection of peer evaluated websites, mostly focused on K12.

State Repositories

  • Open Oregon: Oregon Higher Ed list of resources by course.

  • Washington 45: top 45 quarter credits of general education courses and links to texts in Washington state.

  • The Orange Grove: Florida's collection of open ed sources.

Media, Art, Images, and more

  • Images: Creative Commons has the best search engine for image or other resources that are CC licensed.

  • PhET Science Simulations: These interactive tools from the University of Colorado at Boulder are mostly CC licensed.

  • Vimeo: A  great place to find for a wide variety of video content.  Variety of licenses too, some open for redistribution or open access.

  • Jamendo: Music by musicians who want to share their music.

  • Ted: Inspiring  and thought-provoking video lectures and interviews on a vast array of subjects, all CC licensed.

  • Wikimedia Commons: The creators of Wikipedia bring together images, video and music that is openly licensed or in the public domain.

  • HippoCampus: HippoCampus, a project of the Monterey Institute of Technology and Education (MITE), is a collection of quality resources aimed at high school and college level students.

  • Digital Commons Network:  an incredible collection of full-text scholarly articles published by colleges and universities worldwide.

​Library Resources

Does a Library count as Open?


The short answer is, no. Library resources are collections of copyrighted materials. However, these collections hold diverse selections of quality academic resources that have already been purchase on your and your students' behalf. These can be used in incorporating accessible and free materials into your courses.


Library eBooks can be used as textbooks, primary or supplementary. Links to articles in library databases make great, current information points to share with your students. Films in library databases provide both inside and outside the classroom educational experiences for your students.

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