5 Sources for OER
In this section we will look at some sources for OER content. This list is not exhaustive, rather, it is illustrative of the types of places you can searching for OER content.
Some Major Producers of OER content:
OpenStax is a nonprofit organization based out of Rice University that strives to increase student access to educational materials by producing openly licensed textbooks for college and Advanced Placement courses. Thanks in part to funding by the Gates and Hewlett foundations, OpenStax textbooks are among the most commonly used open textbooks across the country and often come with important free ancillary materials for instructors, such as PowerPoint slides and homework answers.
Open SUNY Textbooks is a publishing initiative through the State University of New York libraries. The project was launched in 2012, and textbook creation is supported by small grants to faculty. The project aims to publish cost-effective, high-quality open resources that can be used by everyone.
BCcampus is an organization that supports all of the post-secondary institutions of British Columbia in their efforts to improve teaching practices, especially as they relate to open education. The BCcampus Open Textbook Project has been a leader in supporting the production of open textbooks and other OER through financial support from the Canadian government and the Hewlett Foundation. It also provides a useful search tool for open textbooks.
Saylor Academy is a nonprofit organization that assembles freely available courses using open content. The foundation currently offers nearly 100 free, college-level courses, each of which is peer reviewed by faculty for accuracy and quality. When OER aren’t available for a course being developed, Saylor Academy funds the creation of new, openly licensed materials in collaboration with faculty experts.
Lumen Learning is an education technology organization which develops low-cost digital open courseware. Lumen-supported course materials are freely available by linking to the website content. They have partnered with over 250 colleges and universities across the United States to produce effective sustainable OER.
OER Repositories and Referatories
The Open Textbook Library is a referatory of open textbooks that are, in many cases, reviewed by faculty. The library is a resource maintained by the Open Textbook Network. The Open Textbook Library is one of the most comprehensive collections of open textbooks, featuring more than 575 titles.
Developed by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), OER Commons was launched in 2007 to serve as both a digital library of OER and a collaboration platform. OER Commons allows for easy discovery of OER, as well as their modification within the same platform.
The Creative Commons search tool, CC Search isn’t a search engine itself, but it provides easy access to many of the search platforms that include CC-licensed materials. The limiters at the top allow you to restrict your search to only items with certain permissions (based on the CC license assigned to them). This can be a useful tool for finding images, videos, music, and public domain material.
Developed by George Mason University and the Mason Publishing Group, the Mason OER Metafinder doesn’t provide a single database for searching OER, but instead performs your search simultaneously across multiple sources of OER material. This federated search can increase discovery and prevents the need for updating a centralized database. The tool can be very useful for helping a faculty member who is looking for OER in a niche area of study or who has had difficulty searching in several of the major repositories.
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS), developed by SUNY Geneseo, is a search platform that aims to make discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 76 different sources and contains more than 177,000 records. Adding an OASIS search widget to your website or research guide can be easily done.
Others:
Many other OER repositories exist and are being developed as librarians attempt to overcome the challenge of findability for faculty. Below are a few more to be aware of:
- Open Professionals Education Network (OPEN) List
- MERLOT (note that this also includes free content that isn’t openly licensed)