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Open Education Resources (OER) for Faculty: Finding OER

This guide explores the world of Open Educational Resources (OER) available freely online for course use.

General Repositories

OASIS is an OER integrated discovery tool that searches over 70 OER resources for content.

 

George Mason's OER Metafinder, like OASIS, searches multiple OER recourses for OER content. 

Open Text Book Library, from the University of Minnesota, has open textbooks used throughout higher education, representing several disciplines. Before posting, these open textbooks are reviewed by faculty for quality. 

OpenStax is a project of Rice University that makes available peer-reviewed textbooks for foundational courses across disciplines as well as open courseware. Many OpenStax textbooks include supplemental materials available for free or at a low-cost. 

BC Campus OpenEd is a Canadian initiative that works to create and adapt textbooks for core courses to Canadian standards. Ancillary materials often accompany these texts.

HathiTrust offers digitized books and journals from universities and research institutions around the world. 

Open SUNY Textbooks comes from the libraries in the State University of New York and includes open peer-reviewed textbooks written by faculty. 

OER Commons hosts a variety of open educational resources including textbooks, labs, lessons, and tutorials. Use their advanced search feature to comb through the site's offerings. OER Commons also hosts a networking function through its groups feature.

MERLOT, from the California State University, offers peer-reviewed open materials for course use, including textbooks. 

Teaching Commons hosts open access textbooks, course material, lesson plans, and more, all curated by librarians and higher education institutions.

Luminos contains academic works from the University of California Press. 

Lumen Learning contains open courses across the disciplines.

Project Gutenberg hosts many older publications that are outside of copyright. 

Purdue e-Pubs makes available a selection of Purdue University Press' books from the 1960s up to current.

Saylor Academy compiles several open textbooks along with their our open courses.

UC Press E-Books Collections contains online versions of over 2,000 academic texts from University of California Press, ranging across disciplines.  

University of Pittsburgh Digital Editions has digital access to a selection of out of print items on its website. 

Subject-specific Resources

BCcampus Open Education OER by Discipline takes BCcampus' offerings and organizes them handily by discipline for easier browsing.

Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

HumBox is a resource from the UK that provides a space for openly sharing humanities course materials.

Writing Commons is an open text web resource for college-level writing with chapters concerning the writing process, academic writing, creative writing, rhetoric, and information literacy.

Writing for Success is an open textbook for writing at the college level, with introductory chapters that familiarize students with expectations for reading and assignments in higher education. 

Writing Sources is an open resource with essays concerning writing.

Open Geography Education is a resource listing several open source texts in geography. 

STEM

The National Academies Press (of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine) makes available PDF versions of various texts on their website.

OpenIntro Statistics is an open textbook for introductory college-level statistics with a focus on applied statistics. Print copies can be purchased from Amazon for $14.99, and the book will be receiving a new edition in 2019.

 

Search for Related Course Materials by ISBN

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Library Resources

Don't forget to check the library's online catalog for books, or databases for scholarly articles! While these are not OER, they are services provided for the Trinity community to use. If you have questions about how to find a resource, ask a librarian!