Guides: OER: Open Educational Resources: Finding Content

Finding OER

AcademicPub
AcademicPub is a build-your-own-textbook service that offers students three different options for purchasing the book: digital download, paperback, or hardcover.
Instructors can create a customized textbook with book chapters, case studies and journal articles.
AcademicPub provides services to track how much royalties will cost for each custom textbook.
American Institute of Mathematics: Open Textbook Initiative
The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) seeks to encourage the adoption of open source and open access mathematics textbooks. The AIM Editorial Board has developed evaluation criteria to identify the books that are suitable for use in traditional university courses and maintains a list of Approved Textbooks which have been judged to meet these criteria.
BC Campus Open Textbooks
British Columbia-based project focusing on the 60 highest enrollment courses. Includes faculty resources, help and case studies.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Contains links to a wide range of multimedia objects form libraries, archives and museums around the United States (so not international).
The copyright status of items vary because it is collected from many sources. However, many items are public domain or available for re-use, and there is information in a "rights" field for each item.
Directory of Open Access Books
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.
InTech
A multidisciplinary Open Access publisher of books and journals covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine.
InTech as published more than 850 Open Access books, and provides support services for faculty who wish to publish a book or journal and make it available via Open Access.
Lumen Learning Course Catalog
Interactive texts for many 100-200 level courses. Includes faculty resources and assignments.
"Co-founded by open-education visionary Dr. David Wiley and education-technology strategist Kim Thanos, Lumen Learning is dedicated to facilitating broad, successful adoption of OER."
MedEdPORTAL
Free online peer-reviewed publication service for medical resources such as teaching materials, assessment tools and faculty development.
Promotes educational collaboration through the open exchange of scholarly educational resources.
Users can download and utilize any and all of the published resources for educational purposes without legal infringements.
Merlot II
A free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education
Links to online learning materials are collected here along with assignments and comments to enhance the teaching experience of an exercise
NanoHUB
Provides over 1600 open teaching and learning resources: online presentations; course material; learning modules; podcasts; simulation tools.
Created by the NSF-funded Network for Computational Nanotechnology
OER Commons: Open Textbooks
This catalog contains hundreds of college-level open textbooks from higher education institutions around the world.
Open Course Library
Range of manterials including syllabi, course activities, and assessments created by faculty, instructional designers, librarians, other experts. Some of these materials are intended to be paired with textbooks.
This is a smaller collection, but is sponsored by the Washington State Board of Education and therefore the materials have undergone testing for accessibility and assessed for quality.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials are shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY) license and are available for download and editing via Google Docs.
Open Educational Resources Textbook List - Sacred Heart University
Discipline specific OER textbook list for departments at SHU, compiled by Zach Claybaugh and Chelsea Stone.
OpenStax CNX
OpenStax CNX is a dynamic non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month in the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes.There are tens of thousands of learning objects, called pages, that are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device, anywhere, anytime.
All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons attribution license
OpenStax College
OpenStax College offers free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers.
OpenSUNY textbooks
On this site you’ll find openly licensed textbooks and courses written and curated by SUNY Faculty. Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits repurposing by others.For more about OER in SUNY, visit OpenNYS to see how OER is being used all over New York State, or explore SUNY OER Services at oer.suny.edu.
Open Textbook Catalog
A catalog of open access textbooks to be reviewed by faculty members, made available by the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development.
All textbooks in this catalog are openly licenses, complete, and available in print at very little cost.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are textbooks that 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. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. The library currently includes 683 textbooks, with more being added all the time.
The Orange Grove
Florida's Educational Resource Repository including The collections are open to the public and include Open Courseware, Open Textbooks, 3d object models, learning modules, and videos.K-12 and college and university level resources.
SmARThistory
A free and open, online, not-for-profit art history textbook with complete multimedia content.
Textbook Revolution
A student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors
The approach is to bring all of the free textbooks they can find together in one place, review them, and let the best rise to the top and find their way into the hands of students in classrooms around the world

Creative Commons Search
STILL IN BETA "Use this prototype to find images that you can use and remix across several open archives. Give us your feedback to help us design a front door to the commons."
Flickr Creative Commons
"Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license."
Getty Search Gateway
"The Getty Search Gateway allows users to search across several of the Getty repositories, including collections databases, library catalogs, collection inventories, and archival finding aids."
This search has an "Open Content Images" filter for easy searching of OA images!
National Gallery of Art Images
"NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 45,000 open access digital images up to 4000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration."
NYPL Digital Collections
"This site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more."
Shared Shelf Commons
"Shared Shelf Commons is a free, open-access library of images. Search and browse collections with tools to zoom, print, export, and share images. Institutions that subscribe to Shared Shelf, a Web-based service for cataloging and managing digital collections, can share their images with the world via the Commons."
more...less...
(also see the library's subscription database to Artstor)
Wellcome Images
"Many of [these] images are available to download from this site free of charge, both commercially and non-commercially under a Creative Commons Attribution Only – CC-BY 4.0 licence. This includes all historical, Wellcome-owned images. You do not need to contact us for permission to reproduce free images."

NYPL Digital Collections
"This site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more."
Moving Image Archive
This library contains digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts.
Our goal in digitizing these movies and putting them online is to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival films.
By providing near-unrestricted access to these films, we hope to encourage widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not have used them before."
National Debate Coaches Association Open Video Project
"This a collection of videos including lectures, demonstration debates, and other lessons freely shared by debate programs and summer debate institutes. We've gathered these links all in once place to help students and coaches find teaching materials that are not collected elsewhere."

Information For Educators

The Academic Commons
The Academic Commons is a platform for sharing practices, outcomes, and lessons learned. The community can use this platform to advance specific collaborative efforts toward stated strategic goals and concrete outcomes and to facilitate the collaborative development of knowledge. The Academic Commons provides studio space for developing ideas, presents a portfolio of experimentation, and serves as a platform/tool that institutions and organizations can use strategically to share their own and learn from each other’s work in an open, collaborative way.
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)
CCCOER is a growing consortium of community and technical colleges committed to expanding access to education and increasing student success through adoption of open educational policy, practices, and resources. Our activities support this dynamic community with information, resources, news, projects and building connections.
Open Education Consortium
The Open Education Consortium is a global network of educational institutions, individuals and organizations that support an approach to education based on openness, including collaboration, innovation and collective development and use of open educational materials. The Open Education Consortium is a non-profit, social benefit organization registered in the United States and operating worldwide.
WikiEducator
WikiEducator is a community project working collaboratively with the Free Culture Movement towards incremental development of open educational resources.
Art History Teaching Resources
"Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR) is a peer-populated platform for art history teachers. AHTR is home to a constantly evolving and collectively authored online repository of art history teaching content including, but not limited to, lesson plans, video introductions to museums, book reviews, image clusters, and classroom and museum activities. The site promotes discussion and reflection around new ways of teaching and learning in the art history classroom through a peer-populated blog, and fosters a collaborative virtual community for art history instructors at all career stages."
Community of Online Research Assignments (CORA)
"An open educational resource (OER) for faculty and librarians. It is intended to be a collaborative space for adapting and experimenting with research assignments and sharing the success or lessons learned so that others may benefit. The database contains multiple, reliable and reproducible research assignments that do not live as isolated entities, but are enhanced by user feedback in order to build a rich corpus of best practices. There is also a Teaching Toolkit featuring a wide range of resource types including pedagogy/theory, assessment, librarian blogs, classroom activities, technology tips, subject guides, citation tools, and information literacy tutorials."

Open Attribution Builder This link opens in a new window
"This is a tool to help you build attributions. As you fill out the form, the app automatically generates the attribution for you."