Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: Find OER

There are a number of search portals and repositories that compile free and openly licensed resources.

Type - Some repositories are purely Open Textbook Collections, whilst others cover varying types of open material such Full Courses and other supplementary material such as syllabi, case studies, images and videos.

Quality - Quality of material varies, depending on each repositories' requirements. Generally, OER affiliated with particular institutions with textbooks or courses authoured by faculty are of good quality. Other collections also stipulate certain requirements or peer review processes, ensuring a certain standard. However, care must still be taken to evaluate material:

Recency - although good quality and written by faculty, some open textbooks may not be sufficiently updated.
Region - material may have been originally written with a regional focus (eg. USA, Europe etc.), and may not contain examples that are comprehensive on an international level.

Conditions of Use - Although most material listed in these search portals are openly licensed (can be remixed and adapted), not all are, and some are only free to use as-is. Generally, under the different Creative Commons licenses, attribution/credit must be given to the original authour, and material reproduced cannot be further copyrighted.

Open Textbook Collections

Open Textbook Library
A collection of open textbooks managed by the University of Minnesota and their partners. Textbooks are quality checked, such that they are required to be either affiliated with an institution or adopted by multiple institutions.
OpenStax
Openly licensed and peer-reviewed textbooks supported and hosted by Rice University.
BCcampus OpenEd
The BC Open Textbook Project brings together a collection of textbooks built around British Columbia's most-enrolled subject areas.
Open SUNY Textbooks
Textbooks published by State University of New York libraries. Their open textbooks are authored and peer-reviewed by faculty, ensuring a high quality.
College Open Textbooks
A collaborative initiative of several higher education member institutions who contribute to peer-review. Although targeted to community colleges, many textbooks are also at an appropriate level for introductory first and second-year university courses.
Global Text Project
Originally seeded from the University of Georgia, Global Text Project contains open textbooks across a range of subject areas.

Course Content and Learning Materials

Open Course Library
Contains a selection of syllabi and whole university courses by faculty from various institutions. Course materials are available to download and use for your teaching.
MERLOT II
An initiative by California State University. MERLOT II contains a variety of learning materials, such as case studies and course material. Recognized for its thorough peer review process, MERLOT has several discipline-related editorial boards which ensure quality of listed material.
OER Commons
A large collection of open materials from other repositories, including syllabi, lesson plans and full courses. Use the advanced search to filter by subject area, material type, and conditions of use. OER commons is a project by ISKME (Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education).
MIT OpenCourseWare
MIT's repository of all its courses made openly available. Find courses by MIT course number or department. As with other Creative Commons licenses, when adopting MIT material for your teaching, credit must be given to MIT and the faculty authour of the respective material.
Teaching Commons
Collects OERs drawn from the Institutional Repositories of various universities and colleges on the Digital Commons Network.