What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?
Open Educational Resources ( also termed open content or open courseware ) are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to be shared, remixed or improved to redistribute.
Open Educational Resources include:
- Learning Content: full courses, course material, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
- Tools: software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and online learning communities.
- Implementation Resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.
For even more open educational resources that you can adopt, visit our OER guide.
Image Credit: opensource.com
OERs in STEM
- American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) approved textbooksAIM provides a list of open access textbooks that meet the AIM editorial board's evaluation criteria (linked at http://aimath.org/textbooks/evaluation-criteria/)
- Chemical Education Digital Library (ChemEd DL)"The Chemical Education Digital Library Living Textbooks are online textbooks which cover a variety of topics including general and physical chemistry. Some of the Living Textbooks are editable or customizable to your course."
- EDUCASE - Open Educational ResourcesA link and list of OER publications.
- MERLOT This link opens in a new window
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Global resources by higher education faculty, staff, and students. Learning materials include lesson plans, images, videos, syllubi, quizzes, exams, and even textbooks.
- My NASA DataFull lesson plans and science project ideas on contemporary science topics. This site also includes a Live Access Server which provides real data sets for classroom use.
- National Academies Press This link opens in a new window
The National Academies Press (NAP) publishes the publications of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. NAP publishes more than 200 publications per year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative, independently researched information on important matters in science and health policy. - National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) This link opens in a new window
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The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information.
- National Stem ConsortiumThe National Stem Consortium STEM Bridge Strategy grant project includes course materials available to every college in the U.S.
- RANDA nonprofit research institute funded though donations and research contracts (its website notes that “RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.”). Publications include research monographs, reports, and more. Available as downloadable PDFs (and sometimes EPUBs).
- Saylor.org AcademyFull courses on a variety of topics. Most have CC licenses. Some are protected under a different license.
- Unversity of California Irvine Open ChemistryUCI has made "a full undergraduate education's worth of classes available for immediate incorporation in part or in full by institutions of higher education or by individual professors."
- Lumen LearningLumen provides open courses in a variety of high-demand subjects and disciplines. These courses are collections of high-quality OER, not necessarily as a traditional textbook. You can use them as-is or modify them to fit your instructional style and students’ needs.
Streaming Resources
- Internet Archive - Moving Image ArchiveOver 1.5 million digitized video clips, including cartoons, commercials and classic films. Many of these sources are in the public domain or available via Creative Commons.
- Khan AcademyThousand of videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history. Also, includes skills to practice.
- Open Video ProjectA repository of open access digitized videos for education and learning.
- TED-Ed: Lessons Worth SharingA new initiative of curated educational videos on "Lessons (plans) Worth Sharing."
- Ted Talks - TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)Nonprofit videos lectures devoted to "Ideas Worth Spreading."
Books
- DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books This link opens in a new window
DOAB is a community-curated online directory of open-access, academic, peer-reviewed ebooks.
- Internet History Sourcebooks ProjectThe Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use.
- OpenStax This link opens in a new window
OpenStax is a textbook platform that has been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. Textbooks cover subject areas such as STEM, social sciences, and humanities. - Open Textbook Library This link opens in a new window
These textbooks have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality and cover a myriad of topics. - Project Gutenberg This link opens in a new window
Project Gutenberg offers over 60,000 free e-books (most are out of copyright in the United States): choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. - HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new window
The HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the immense collections of partner institutions in digital form, preserving them for future generations. You can search and access fully viewable materials in HathiTrust and download materials where there are no third-party restrictions or are in the public domain. - Digital Public Library of America This link opens in a new window
This brings together the collections of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available. It provides over 34 million images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, and the data of science.