LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: Finding and Evaluating OER

Resources

BC Campus OpenEd
Links to nearly 100 subject-organized open textbooks
LibreTexts
LibreTexts provide free and open textbooks for a variety of subject areas supporting higher education.
Milne Open Textbooks
40 textbooks currently available with more under development. Uses open-peer review.
OpenStax
Peer-reviewed textbooks with additional learning resources. Explore the textbooks for free. Create a faculty account to be able to review textbooks and access the additional resources like questionbanks.
Open Textbook Library
Peer-reviewed textbooks in a variety of disciplines. All textbooks within the collection are "either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization."

Carnegie Mellon
The Open Learning Initiative from Carnegie Mellon provides complete access to a wide variety of courses including programming, logic, and language.
MIT OpenCourseware
Designed for the independent learner, the site provides access to all of the materials used in teaching a variety of courses at MIT. It can be browsed to find courses by subject, department, or course number.
Open Course Library
From the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Courses, this site offer courses materials including syllabi, lectures, textbooks for their 81 highest enrolled courses.
Open Michigan
Full course content, including videos, lectures, assignments. Additionally, open data sets and other publications are available.
Open Yale
Provides full access to a variety of materials from introductory courses offered at Yale.

Aerospace Engineering

Aerospace Engineering Commons
Articles, conference papers, presentations, and more in the field of aerospace engineering, from the Digital Commons Network.
NASA e-books
A variety of ebooks published by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration covering manned and unmanned space exploration, systems engineering, flight, research and development, and more.
National Academies Press: Space and Aeronautics
Aviation, space, astronomy and astrophysics publications from the National Academies.

Aviation

Aviation Commons
Aviation- and aerospace-related journals, articles, conference papers, theses, dissertations, books, PowerPoint files, and other open access materials from the Digital Commons Network.
FAA Regulations and Policies Library
Federal Aviation Administration regulations, forms, handbooks, manuals, policy statements, etc.
Skybrary
SKYbrary provides resources on aviation safety, weather, physics, and more. They also have toolkits available, include SKYclips, which are short videos about common aviation topics.

Engineering

Open Textbooks for Engineering
Provided by the ASEEE, this site links to open textbooks covering all areas of engineering.

English/Humanities

HathiTrust Digital Library
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. These are technically not OER, but it makes accessible public domain and out of copyright publications.
Open Library
Not technically OER, Open Library is attempting to create one web page for every book. It is a catalog that will link you to open access versions of out of copyright works and provide links to library that have physical books that are still in copyright.
Project Gutenberg
While not technically OER, Project Gutenberg provides access to over 54,000 ebooks that are out of copyright. Ebooks are available in html, epub, pdf, and plain text formats.
World Digital Library
The World Digital Library seeks to preserve and share some of the world’s most important cultural objects, increasing access to cultural treasures and significant historical documents to enable discovery, scholarship, and use.

Language

COERLL
Foreign language resources and activities, including Arabic and Mandarin.

Math

American Institute of Mathematics
Textbooks listed here have met the AIM evaluation criteria.
My Open Math
Started by a Professor in Washington state, this resource is now supported by Lumen Learning. It provides homework, quizzes, and tests, as well as textbooks.

Psychology

Noba
Curated collection of psychology materials by faculty from across the United States. Content can be used as is or remixed and adapted. Instructor manuals, test banks, and slides are available.

Sciences

AMSER: Applied Math and Science Education Repository
Built for community and technical colleges and funded by the National Science Foundation, this resource provides a variety of materials that are free to use.
ChemCollective
This resource from Carnegie Mellon provides virtual labs, activities, tutorials, and more.
Chemistry LibreText
This is "a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts to improve postsecondary education at all levels of higher learning." Contains texts, exercises, worksheets, case studies, and more.
National Science Digital Library
Provides OER resources at all levels in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
PhET: Free online physics, chemistry, biology, chemistry, earth science, and math simulations
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.
Scitable
From Nature Education, this resource is focused on cell biology and genetics.

California Open Online Library for Education
Includes course materials, textbooks, OER, complete courses, journals, and articles.
Creative Commons Search
Please note that search.creativecommons.org is not a search engine, but rather offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations. It attempts to limit results to openly licensed materials, but results are not guaranteed to be open.
Directory of Open Access Books
This directory currently links to "8022 Academic peer-reviewed books and chapters from 212 publishers." It is an international resource. To be included, the resource must be open access.
Google Spreadsheet of Resources
This publicly-maintained spreadsheet links to many different open access resources divided by type of resource, such as images, videos, audio, ebooks, etc. Its focus is open access at all levels and so has K-12 as well as higher education resources. It also promotes general public resources like Pixabay.
MERLOT
A resource to find peer-reviewed materials that are free and open access. It is for an international education community. Links to all types of materials including lectures, videos, games, textbooks, and more.
OAPEN
OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books.
Oasis
Created by the Milne library at SUNY Geneseo, this search engine looks at open content from 117 sources around the world.
OER Commons
Like MERLOT it provides access to all types of materials and across all grade levels. Searches can be restricted by type of material, subject, and level of education.
The OER Knowledge Cloud
The OER Knowledge Cloud is a curated database and repository to identify, collect, preserve and disseminate documents related to open educational resources.
OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR maintains a comprehensive and authoritative list of open access institutional and subject-based repositories. This page allows you to search the content of the repositories.

Images

Pixabay
"Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images and videos. All contents are released under Creative Commons CC0, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist - even for commercial purposes."
The Noun Project
Over 1 Million icons, royalty–free. Many icons are creative commons licensed.

Videos

Kahn Academy YouTube Channel
Videos on anything from regression analysis to Buddhism to the Knights Templar. The goal of Kahn Academy is to provide open education that is freely available to everyone.
TED-Ed: Lessons Worth Sharing
"TED-Ed’s mission is to spark and celebrate the ideas of teachers and students around the world. Everything we do supports learning — from producing a growing library of original animated videos , to providing an international platform for teachers to create their own interactive lessons, to helping curious students around the globe . . . "

The following are repositories of known OER adoptions. If you are looking for textbooks for a specific course, you may want to search these repositories to see what has worked in other university classes.

BC Campus: Known Open Textbook Adoptions
A list of known OER textbook adoptions in Canada, including metrics of reviews, views, and downloads.
Open Oregon
A list of known OER textbook adoptions in the state of Oregon.
Open Syllabus - OER Metrics
OER Metrics tracks the adoption of openly-licensed textbooks and monographs in higher education.
VIVA: Course Mapping
A list of known OER textbook adoptions in the state of Virginia.

Biology 1625 Lab Manual
Drs. Bill Tanner and Melissa Hardy at Salt Lake Community College used their students to create the images for this new open lab manual.
La palabra escrita para un mundo de retos globales
A second-year Spanish textbook created by Michael Dabrowski with his students. He found that the students' mix of abilities complemented each other and made the resultant work stronger.
The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature
Realizing that published anthologies can be expensive for students, Professor DeRosa decided to create an alternative with her students.

Evaluating OER

It may be that an excellent resource is found that is not peer-reviewed. In those cases, faculty must rely on criteria that they would use in reviewing a traditionally published textbook to determine if the resource is reliable or not.

Librarians are available to assist with finding and evaluating material or you can use these rubrics:

ACHIEVE Consolidated Rubric
Provides a traditionally-styled rubric to grade an OER in terms of subject matter, alignment with course, instruction, quality of assessment, interactivity, instructional/practice exercises, opportunity for deeper learning, and accessibility
Faculty Guide for Evaluating Open Educational Resources
From librarians in support of BCcampus, this rubric considers accurancy, relevance, quality, accessibility, and more.
Faculty Review of Open eTextbooks
This rubric was created by the California OER Council a state-created coalition that includes members from the California State University, University of California and California Community Colleges systems.

Getting in the Air

There are a number of repositories that gather OER materials. Some provide faculty reviews and annotations. Additionally, many disciplines host their own repositories. This list is not comprehensive but should provide a good starting point for finding OER.