There are tons of Open Educational Resources and Open Educational Repositories available for you to feature in your courses. If you are just beginning your OER search, review this large list of content to familiarize yourself with what is available to you. Then, utilize the OER Evaluation, Selection, and Licensing Guide to learn more about how to evaluate OERs for your course.
Table of Contents
Search Engine
The Mason OER Metafinder
The Mason OER Metafinder helps you find Open Educational Resources. Unlike other OER repository sites (e.g., OER Commons, OASIS, MERLOT, OpenStax, etc.), the OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different sources of open educational materials.
Repositories
AMSER (Applied Math and Science Education Repository)
The AMSER is a portal of OERs and open services designed for faculty and students in community and technical colleges. It includes content in the Arts, Education Technology, Health, Mathematics, Science, Social Students, Vocational Education, and more.
Blended Learning Toolkit
An OER for building your own online curriculum, download one of the Blended Learning Toolkit’s ample courses and you get a set of web templates you can load onto your own server and use as the basis for an online course.
Bookboon
All of Bookboon’s textbooks for students– and there are over a thousand–are completely free and can easily be downloaded in PDF format. They are all written exclusively for Bookboon by professors from the world’s top universities.
Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL)
The center is one of 16 National Foreign Language Resource Centers (LRCs) funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The overall mission of these federally funded centers is to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages by producing resources (materials and best practices) that can be profitably employed in a variety of settings.
DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books)
This service indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed books and open access book publishers. The directory contains information on a wide range of subjects and content from over 500 publishers.
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
A community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. The directory provides articles in more than 500 subject areas.
IntechOpen
Scientific progress is generated by collaboration, and IntechOpen believes that OER textbooks are the first step on the journey to democratize knowledge. All texts are provided with free access on all electronic devices. Subjects include Health Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering, Technology, Social Sciences, and Humanities.
Internet Archive
A nonprofit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. The archive contains 475 billion web pages, 28 million books and texts, 14 million audio recordings, 6 million videos (including 2 million television news programs), 3.5 million images, and 580,000 software programs. Books published prior to 1926 are available for download, and hundreds of thousands of modern books can be borrowed through their corresponding Open Library.
JSTOR Open Access
JSTOR provides access to 7,000+ e-books from over 90 publishers. Users do not need to register or log in and there are no limits or restrictions on PDF downloads or printing.
Lumen/Boundless
This catalog contains educational content originally curated by Boundless. In collaboration with the Boundless team, Lumen Learning imported these OER courses to the Lumen Platform to ensure they remain freely available to the education community after Boundless ceased operations. Topics include Accounting, Algebra, Art History, Economics, Finance, Chemistry, Sociology, Physics, and More
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching)
MERLOT is a free, curated collection of online resources designed for faculty and students in higher education. Disciplines include the Arts, Business, Education, Humanities, Mathematics/Statistics, Science and Technology, Social Sciences, and Workforce Development. This repository offers a large variety of material types including animations, assignments, case students, drill and practice, textbooks, presentations, reference materials, tutorials, and much more.
Milne Open textbooks (SUNY Open)
Milne library Publishing at SUNY manages and maintains this catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff. Subjects include but are not limited to Poetry, Biometrics, Information Literacy, Web Development and Programming, Physics, Mathematical Logic, and Writing in College.
MIT OpenCourseware
MIT provides online publication of materials from over 2,500 MIT courses. Search by topic, courses, department, textbooks, A/V content, and supplemental resources.
National Academies Press
This resource provides textbooks on various education studies topics, including Early Childhood Education, Education Research and Theory, Educational Technology, K-12 Education, Teacher Preparation and Professional Development, and more.
OASIS (Openly Available Sources Integrated Search)
This tool searches open content from over 100 different sources and contains almost 400,000 different content items including textbooks, audiobooks, videos, podcasts, learning objectives, simulations, and full courses and modules. OASIS is used by more than 513 institutions globally.
OER Commons
OER Commons is a public digital library and collaboration platform dedicated to OER resources. This library provides infrastructure for curriculum experts and instructors at all education levels to identify and collaborate on OER. Subjects include Applied Science, Arts and Humanities, Business and Communication, Career and Technical Education, Education, English, History, Law, Life Science, Mathematics, Physical Science, and Social Science.
Open Michigan
This website provides the freely available products of the University of Michigan’s research, teaching, and creative community. Content has been provided by the following UM departments: Architecture, Chemistry, Dentistry, Education, Educational Technology, Engineering, Global Health, History, Law, Literature, Arts, Mathematics, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Physics, Public Health, Public Policy, Romance Languages, and Statistics.
Open Textbook Library
This repository contains complete, original textbooks that are openly licensed and used at multiple institutions of higher education. Subjects include Business, Computer Science, Education, Engineering, Humanities, Journalism, Media Studies, Communications, Law, Mathematics, Medicine/Nursing, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences.
Open Culture
Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural and educational media for the lifelong learning community. Types of content include online courses, podcasts, movies, audiobooks, e-books, and more.
OpenStax™
OpenStax publishes peer-reviewed, free, openly licensed textbooks. These textbooks are free online or can be printed for a low cost. Subject areas include the Arts, Business, Humanities, Mathematics and Statistics, Science and Technology, and Social Sciences.
SkillsCommons
SkillsCommons’ mission is to accelerate education’s democratization through open educational services and resources, enabling individuals, communities, educational institutions, organizations, and businesses to prepare people for successful employment in the 21st Century. Materials provided include syllabi, presentations, assignments, assessments, courses, illustrations, graphics, and more.
Teaching Commons
Teaching Commons shares high-quality OERs from colleges and universities. Content provided on Teaching Commons is curated by librarians and includes textbooks, materials, lesson plans, multimedia, lectures, and more. Subject areas include Arts & Humanities, Business, Education, Engineering, Law, Life Sciences, Medicine & Health Sciences, Physical Sciences & Mathematics, and Social & Behavioral Science.
WikiEducator
WikiEducator is a global community resource supported by the Open Education Resource Foundation. This platform provides opportunities for planning, development, building, and networking about OER content. Other Wiki-provided OER content includes WikiBooks and Wikimedia Commons.
Free Courses for Student Study & Practice
Coursera
Coursera provides universal access to world-class educational opportunities by partnering with top universities and organizations to offer courses for anyone to take, for free.
edX
EdX offers interactive online classes and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) from the world’s best universities, colleges, and organizations.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy provides free online courses, lessons, and practice opportunities for students. Students are able to work at their own pace and practice skills they’ll need to use in your classroom.
LinkedIn Learning
LinkedIn Learning provides expertise from effective, passionate educators who are respected authorities in software, creative, and business fields. Courses are organized into subject areas and topics, providing an excellent opportunity for student practice and preparation.
Skillshare
Skillshare is a learning community built specifically for creators. Students enrolled in classes complete projects that unlock personal creativity.
Udacity
Udacity provides online courses and credentials built by top leaders in business such as AT&T and Google in order to teach skills that industry employers need today.
Udemy
Udemy is a marketplace for online learning, offering people everywhere the opportunity to develop their personal passions or learn something new.
Healthcare OERs
CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention)
The CDC includes a wide array of resources, such as videos, population level data, case studies, and open access images.
HHS (Department of Health and Human Services)
The Department of Health and Human Services is the government agency under which many other health-related agencies are also housed. Although not a traditional OER, HHS has 11 operating divisions, including eight agencies in the U.S. Public Health Service and three human services agencies. Each of these agencies includes various sub agencies, all of which include a vast array of healthcare resources useful in the education setting.
JHSPH OCW (John Hopkins School of Public Health – OpenCourseWare)
OCW makes JHSPH course materials used to teach actual courses freely and openly available on the Web. OpenCourseWare websites differ from academic classes in that they are simply snapshots of content available in an academic course without any interaction with faculty or students at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
MEDtube
A video-centric social e-learning platform for healthcare professionals. The library contains over 25,000 medical materials. Although the main source of content on the website is video, MEDtube also provides images, documents, e-books, e-learning materials, and live events.
NCBI Bookshelf
Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare. Browse the Bookshelf to view the curated list that is built and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
NIH (National Institutes of Health)
A part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, NIH is the largest biomedical research agency in the world. The NIH seeks fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.
OERs for Nursing – George Washington University
GW School of Nursing shares this collection of Open Educational Resources (OERs) for use by nurse educators worldwide. These interactive multimedia learning materials are outcomes of several grant-funded research projects sponsored by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), including the Advanced Nursing Education, Geriatric Education using a Palliative Care Framework (GEPaC), and the Teaching and Transforming through Technology (T3) projects.
Open RN™
The Open RN™ project provides OER Nursing textbooks written based on the Wisconsin State Nursing curriculum. Textbooks include “Nursing Pharmacology,” “Nursing Skills,” “Nursing Fundamentals,” “Mental Health & Community Concepts,” and “Management & Professional Concepts.”
PLOS (Public Library of Science)
PLOS is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher that empowers researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine. All papers published by PLOS are published under Creative Commons licenses.
TedMed
The TEDMED Foundation (TEDMED) is the independent health and medicine edition of the world-famous TED conference, dedicated to “ideas worth spreading.” TED Talks have been viewed online over two billion times around the world. TEDMED convenes and curates extraordinary people and ideas from all disciplines both inside and outside of medicine in pursuit of unexpected connections that accelerate innovation in health and medicine.
Business OERs
Business Commons™
The Digital Commons Network™ is the largest repository of open access scholarly articles from educational institutions from around the world. On the Business Commons site, you have access to over 6,000 scholarly articles by educators and students.
CLEO (Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership)
CLEO is the largest online library for teaching materials on employee ownership. Materials include syllabi, free case studies, recent videos, and new policy reports.
Lyryx
Lyryx partners with publishers and educational businesses in the U.S. and Canada to provide quality online textbook and homework solutions using Creative Commons open licenses. Subjects include Business, Economics, and Mathematics and Statistics.
MIT Management
The MIT Sloan School of Management has provided open and free access to case studies and management simulations. All the materials featured in this library carry a Creative Commons license, allowing them to be downloaded, copied, and distributed/used free of charge by anyone worldwide, with no permission required.
WSJ Video
The WSJ Video site provides brief video clips, most under 3 minutes, covering topics in the news, business, management, tech and culture.
Education OERs
EdHub
EdHub is an online library of professional development materials dedicated to the advancement of best practices in teaching and learning at the PK-12 and higher education levels. The EdHub library provides interactive online resources and a shared learning environment to support individual PK-12 teachers, principals, university teaching assistants, teacher prep students, and university faculty in creating a culture which values teaching and learning.
Edutopia
Edutopia is a comprehensive website and online community that increases knowledge, sharing, and adoption of what works in pre-K–12 education. Some topics include Assessment, Integrated Studies, Project-Based Learning, Social and Emotional Learning, Professional Learning, and Technology Integration.
PhET (Physics Education Technology)
The PhET provides fun, free, interactive research-based science and mathematics simulations. Simulations are available in Java, Flash, or HTML5 and can be run online or downloaded to your computer. All simulations are open source. Subjects include Physics, Chemistry, Math, Earth Science, and Biology.
Technology OERs
arXiv
This site offers open access to Cornell University’s e-print repository for articles in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.
Bokeh
Bokeh is a Python library for creating interactive visualizations for modern web browsers. It helps you build beautiful graphics, ranging from simple plots to complex dashboards with streaming datasets. With Bokeh, you can create JavaScript-powered visualizations without writing any JavaScript yourself.
Codecademy
Codecademy offers interactive courses on JavaScript, HTML/CSS, PHP, Python, and Ruby with APIs created by members of the community. Resources include cheatsheets, projects, articles, and blog posts.
GitHub E-book Foundation
GitHub provides free books over computer science and programming e-books. Some contain code examples, programming project guidelines, and more.
Online Programming Books
This site lists free e-books and online books related to programming, computer science, software engineering, web design, mobile app development, networking, databases, information technology, AI, graphics, and computer hardware, which publishers or authors provide legally on their websites.
Project Euler
Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.
VisPy
VisPy is a high-performance interactive 2D/3D data visualization library leveraging the computational power of modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) through the OpenGL library to display very large datasets.
