Research Guides: Textbook Alternatives: Open Educational Resources

Attribution

Many of the links on this page are provided by Julia Nims, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Eastern Michigan University.

Search Across Many OER Sites

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Open Educational Resources Repositories

MERLOT
"A free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community."
OER Commons
Contains more than 50,000 examples of learning and teaching materials. The advanced search option allows you to limit to common-core standards, grade level, and primary user (teacher or student).
OASIS
This tool searches many sites for OER.
Curriki Library
A large collection of OERs searchable by topic and audience level. This site focuses on K-12 coursework, but does include some materials for college learners. Registration with the site is free, and required.
Khan Academy
Kahn Academy (or KA) provides video lectures on topics from science and math, and some on subjects in the humanities and economics. Many lectures have accompanying interactive activities and practice questions. The collection is searchable and browsable by general area and sub-topic.
TedEd
Educational videos that can be "flipped" (or tailored) for a lesson plan. Many videos include assessments, links to additional resources, and discussion starters.

Subject Specific OER sites - Arts / Humanities

Library of Congress Digital Collections
Gateway to the Library of Congress’s vast resources of digitized American historical materials; documents U.S. history and culture.
Sentence Stable / Paragraph Paddock
A "resource for students and instructors to encounter, consider, practice, and play with language choice" through "examples of various stylistic techniques at work."
SmARThistory
A collection of videos and essays to support the study of art and cultural heritage.
Europeana
Over 50 million "artworks, artifacts, books, videos and sounds from across Europe."
Asian Art Museum - Education
Large collection of Asian artworks, lessons, videos , and background information.
Humanities Commons
From the MLA, a "network for people working in the humanities" with "open-access scholarship and teaching materials", "a WordPress Web site," and a repository.
Google Arts and Culture
This site showcases content from cultural associations. You can explore the site by artists, mediums, art movements, historical events, historical figures, or places. Most of these resources aren't technically OER, but most are free on the web.

Subject Specific OER sites: Health & Medicine

OpenMD
Directory of open resources, includes anatomy, audiology, drugs, evidence & guidelines, first aid, health education, mental health, nursing, nutrition, pediatric health, specialty areas, and more. Uses an advisory board of doctors, scientists, and pharmacists to ensure quality of resources.
SEHRA - Sunshine Electronic Health Record Academic Simulation
an educational simulation of an electronic health records system
PHIL - Public Health Image Library
Photographs, illustrations, and microscopic images in the public domain can be searched by keyword or browsed by category.

Subject Specific OER sites: Education & Psychology

ACRL/EBSS Open Education Resources for Teacher Education
A list of librarian recommended OER for Teacher Education classes.
Cases on Leadership for Equity and Justice in Higher Education - CLEJHE
This open access journal publishes "double-blind peer-reviewed cases for use by educational leadership preparation programs and leaders".
Hidden Brain - College Study Guides
Study guides for selected Hidden Brain podcasts. "Using science and storytelling, Hidden Brain reveals the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, the biases that shape our choices, and the triggers that direct the course of our relationships."
IRIS Center Resources
Resources about evidence-based instructional and intervention practices developed in collaboration with nationally recognized researchers and education experts. Includes modules, case study units, activities, & Web-based tools.
PHIL - Public Health Image Library
Photographs, illustrations, and microscopic images in the public domain can be searched by keyword or browsed by category. Includes many photos of children in educational settings.
Statistics Simulations Project
Simulations useful for teaching Law of Large Numbers, Central Limit Theorem, Joint Distributions, Least Squares Regression, Omitted Variable Bias

Subject specific - Languages & Cultures

Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL)
Find OER for teaching many world languages.
MERLOT World Languages Community Portal
A large collection of World Languages open educational resources contributed and sometime peer reviewed by educators.
Pathways Project - Boise State University
Interpersonal speaking activities for K-16 language instructors, includes resources for Arabic, Basque, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, & Spanish, as well as activities that can be adapted for any language.
Italian Open Education
A collection of openly-licensed and free-to-use 360-degree virtual reality videos for Italian learners and teachers.
Problem-Based Units for Advanced Students of Spanish
"The purpose of these PBL units is to provide advanced students of Spanish (generally 3rd and 4th year college students) a series of compelling problems from Spanish culture and society."
Spanish Grammar Exercises
Online exercises for first year Spanish.
Spanish Grammar in Context
Detailed grammar explanations with authentic video examples
Varieties of English - OED
Provides links by different varieties of English to free resources provided by the Oxford English Dictionary.

Subject Specific OER Sites: Social Sciences

APSA Educate
An online library for political science teaching and learning materials from the American Political Science Association.

Subject Specific OER Sites - STEM

Virtual Lab and Science Resource Directory
Lists free science resources designed to support remote science education.
Animal Diversity Web
An online database of animal natural history, distribution, classification, and conservation biology at the University of Michigan.
BioInteractive
Offers "multimedia resources, including apps, animations, videos, interactives, and virtual labs" on biology, chemistry of life, ecology, environment, evolution, genetics, and scientific process.
ChemCollective - Carnegie Mellon
"The ChemCollective is a collection of virtual labs, scenario-based learning activities, tutorials, and concept tests."
Coloring with Cell
A coloring book exploring cellular biology from the journal Cell. Free.
The Concord Consortium
Many interactive resources for Biology, Chemistry, Earth & Space Science, Engineering, Mathematics, and Physics.
Digital Storytelling Assignment Bank
Offers assignments related to digital storytelling, in categories such as video, audio, web, visual, mashup, design, coding, animated GIFS, and more. Each assignment links to examples of the work that people have done in response to it.
Encyclopedia of Life
"The Encyclopedia of Life brings together information about all life on Earth—one web page for each species. But EOL is much more than 1.9 million species pages. It's an incredible resource for text, images, video, sounds, maps, classifications and more, all freely available online."
Floss Manuals
Free manuals and educational materials about free software.
FreeBookCentre.net
A large very well organized directory of computing related materials, which also includes mathematics, other STEM areas, and business. Many items are are not actually books--but could be lecture notes, syllabi, etc. No evidence that content is vetted, but authors are often affiliated with universities.
IEEE MOOCs and Free Online Courses
Online courses on engineering related topics, Many of these are only temporarily available and have end dates.
Ilumina
iLumina is a digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching materials for chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science
Media Portal for Stem Teaching
Although designed for grades 1 thru 13, many of the OER on this site could work for undergraduate classes. Especially useful for finding interactive OER and short videos.
MyOpenMath
"MyOpenMath is designed for mathematics, providing delivery of homework, quizzes, and tests with rich mathematical content. Students can receive immediate feedback on algorithmically generated questions with numerical or algebraic expression answers. And it can do so much more, providing a full course management system, including file posting, discussion forums, and a full gradebook, all designed with mathematics in mind."
National Science Digital Library - NSDL
Search for STEM related OER.
Tip: The Advanced Search allows you narrow by subject area, material type, and educational use (assessment, instructional, etc.)
Nature Forms
A collection of micro and macro imagery describing forms in nature including landforms, minerals, aquatic and terrestrial animal and plant life, insects, cellular structures and skeletal segments.
Open-i
Open Access Biomedical Image Search Engine
Organic Chemistry Toolkit
Links to OER from a prof at St Olaf College.
PhET Interactive Simulations
"Founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. PhET sims are based on extensive education research and engage students through an intuitive, game-like environment where students learn through exploration and discovery."
Physics Simulations
A free collection of physics simulations with changeable parameters and real-time animation.
Qubes: A BioQuest Project
Focusing on the life sciences, The QUBES platform hosts hundreds of teaching materials, reference materials, and cloud-based software free to use and adapts using open Creative Commons licenses.
Virtual Chemistry and Simulations - ACS
The American Chemical Society provides links to a number of sites where you can find free online resources for teaching chemistry.
The Visible Human Project - U.S. National Library of Medicine
A public-domain library of cross-sectional cryosection, CT, and MRI images obtained from one male cadaver and one female cadaver.
Vision Learning
"high-quality, accessible, educational content in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines at the introductory undergraduate level."
WebWork
"WeBWorK is an open-source online homework system for math and sciences courses. WeBWorK is supported by the MAA and the NSF and comes with a National Problem Library (NPL) of over 20,000 homework problems."
Statistics Simulations Project
Simulations useful for teaching Law of Large Numbers, Central Limit Theorem, Joint Distributions, Least Squares Regression, Omitted Variable Bias

University Sponsored Courseware

Several universities have made available the educational course materials developed by their faculty.

The educational materials for each course may include syllabi, lectures, notes, powerpoint presentations, readings, assignments, and video or audio lectures, depending on the course, the semester, and the professor.

About OER

Additional Resources

The number of resources on OERs grows as interest in them increases. Below are a few links to key reports and documents on the importance of OERs and the issues surrounding them.

A webinar from Inside Higher Ed.

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare

Provides guidance on the use of third-party materials in open educational resources.

7 Things You Should Know About Open Educational Resources
From EDUCAUSE. See also the EDUCAUSE Library on OERs.
Open Educational Resources: The Value of Reuse in Higher Education
Automatically downloads a report from JISC, a UK organization dedicated to advancing digital technologies in higher education.
The Case for Open Educational Resources and Open Policies
Giving Knowledge for Free
The OECD's 2007 report discusses the issues and challenges surrounding OERs.

"Recycle this," by wikieducator, CC BY-SA 2.0

A Cover to Cover Solution: How Open Textbooks are the Path to Textbook Availability
A report by Student PIRGs. A video presentation is also available.
A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources
Provides "readers with a quick and user-friendly introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) and some of the key issues to think about when exploring how to use OER most effectively."

Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education
From UNESCO.
Open Education and the Future
A TEDxMYED talk by Prof. David Wiley (3/06/10)
Open Educational Resources and Their Implementation at Miami University
Describes a plan to implement OER initiatives at Miami University
Open Educational Resources:Tools to Help 21st Century Students Achieve Their Postsecondary Education Goals and Keep America Competitive
An issue brief from the Center for American Progress. Includes links to additional resources
Open Education Week
Open Education Week takes place every March. This site provides links to resources and information about events/webinars.

Open Educational Resources and Their Implementation at Miami University
Describes plan to implement OER initiatives at Miami University.

Page Index

About OERs

Open Educational Materials are free digital learning materials that may be reused and/or customized. They often use Creative Commons copyright. OERs can include:

Lesson plans

Textbooks

Learning modules

Lecture notes and slides

Syllabi

Assignments

Podcasts and videos

Training materials

Open Educational Resources
This guide provides detailed info on open educational resources, including info on creating OERs.
Creative Commons
"Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools," including Creative Commons copyright licenses.
Creative Commons Licenses
This guide provides detailed info on Creative Commons copyright.

Interactive OER

Interactive Open Educational Resources by John D. Shank
Publication Date: 2014
Demonstrates the best tools, resources, and techniques for discovering, selecting, and integrating interactive open educational resources (OERs) into the teaching and learning process.