Finding OER
There are MANY places online where you can find OER. The OASIS search tool searches across multiple sources of OER. It's a great place to start. You can also search any of the individual repositories and sources of open content listed below. If you need additional help finding OER for your course, contact Wendy Walker at the Mansfield Library.
OER Repositories
- MERLOT: Curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools.
- MIT Open Courseware: Free and open collection of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum.
- OER Commons: Broad selection of high-quality OER.
- Open Course Library: Shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts.
- SkillsCommons: Free and open digital library of workforce training materials.
- Teaching Commons: High-quality OER from leading colleges and universities. Includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.
- The WAC Clearinghouse: Publishes open-access journals, books, and other resources for teachers who use writing in their courses.
Open Textbooks and Books
- American Institute of Mathematics Open Textbook Initiative: Open source and open access mathematics textbooks.
- BC Open Collection: Strong in general education but also includes options for skills and trades. Faculty reviews and ancillary resources available for some textbooks.
- The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI): Provides open and free casebooks on legal topics relevant to first-year students.
- Directory of Open Access Books: Peer-reviewed, Open Access books.
- Lever Press: A scholarly press that publishes peer-reviewed, born digital, open access monographs.
- LibreTexts: Provide open and freely accessible textbooks.
- Milne Open Textbooks: Openly-licensed textbooks and courses written and curated by SUNY Faculty.
- OAPEN: Freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences.
- Open Book Publishers: An independent publisher who offers free online editions that can be read online, downloaded, reused or embedded anywhere.
- Open Research Library: Open access books made available by Knowledge Unlatched.
- OpenStax: Provides free, open textbooks; especially good for introductory courses; many come with ancillary content.
- Open Textbook Library: Provides a growing repository of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
- Pressbooks Directory: Directory of books published in the Pressbooks platform.
- Project Gutenberg: Most books in Project Gutenberg are in the public domain so do not have copyright restrictions.
Open Media Materials
- Bandcamp: Find openly licensed music
- Creative Commons Search: Search for a variety of open media (images, video, music, 3D models, etc.)
- Getty Open Content Program: Digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission required.
- HippoCampus: Free, core academic web site that delivers rich multimedia content--videos, animations, and simulations--on general education subjects to middle-school and high-school teachers and college professors, and their students.
- Library of Congress Audio Recordings: Find audio recordings, including music and interviews
- Library of Congress Digital Collections: Digitized versions of collection materials. Many (not all) materials are in the public domain.
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA): Includes a filter for unrestricted images.
- NASA Images: Images, audio, video, and computer files used in the rendition of 3-dimensional models.
- National Science Digital Library: Materials with an emphasis on STEM disciplines. Use the search engine to filter by "terms of use" to find OER.
- New York Public Library - Public Domain Collections: Items in NYPL's Digital Collections that are in the public domain.
- Noun Project: Find icons and photos
- The Periodic Table of Videos (Univ. of Nottingham): Videos accompany each of the elements on the periodic table.
- Pexels: Find images and videos
- PhET Interactive Simulations: Free interactive math and science simulations provided via the University of Colorado, Boulder.
- Pixabay: Find images, videos, music, sound effects, and GIFs
- Vimeo: Use the Creative Commons filter to find openly licensed video
- Wikimedia Commons: Free content, not subject to copyright restrictions.
- YouTube: Use the Creative Commons filter to find openly licensed video
Open Journals and Other Publications
- Directory of Open Access Journals: Indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
- Internet Archive OER: The Internet Archives' space dedicated to OER.
- Open Humanities Press: OHP is an international community of scholars, editors and readers with a focus on critical and cultural theory.
- Open Knowledge Repository: The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.
- PLOS: Publishes a suite of peer-reviewed Open Access journals across all areas of science and medicine.
- ScholarWorks: UM's institutional repository. It hosts and provides open access to OER content created by UM faculty.
- Ubiquity Press: Open Access publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and data.