Research Guides: Explore 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

You can also use an Advanced Search:

Mason OER Metafinder - Advanced

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.
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.
CORE: Open Access for the Humanities (formerly called Humanities Commons)
A repository where humanities scholars can upload course materials, white papers, conference papers, code, and digital projects.
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 - 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.
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
An open-source online homework system for STEM courses.
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

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

Creative Commons Licenses
This guide provides detailed info on Creative Commons copyright.
Open Educational Resources
This guide provides detailed info on open educational resources, including info on creating OERs.