LibGuides: Let's Be Changemakers: Open Educational Resources (OER)

How to Search for OER

What is changemaking education?

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 their free use and re-purposing by others."

From The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

OER materials are released under an open license granting permission for every one to:

Retain -- users have the right to make, archive, and own copies of the content
Reuse -- content can be reused in its unaltered form
Revise -- content can be adapted, adjusted, modified, and altered
Remix -- original or revised content can be combined with other content to create something new
Redistribute -- copies of the content can be shared with others in its original, revised or remixed form.

More information on the specific licensing types and conditions creators apply to their work can can be found on the Creative Commons Licenses and Examples page.

Creative Commons Licenses for Sharing Your Work

OER include digital learning materials such as:

open textbooks
full courses
modules
syllabi
lectures
homework assignments
quizzes
lab activities
games
simulations

Understanding & Using OERs

Curated Lists of OER Materials

OER Commons
English Language Arts Collection Resources
OER Commons
English Language Arts Textbooks and Full Courses Collection Resources
Open Textbook Library
Humanitites - Literature, Rhetoric, and Poetry

Curated Resources on LibGuides

Open Educational Resources at LCC: English & Writing
From Lansing Community College Library
Open Educational Resources (OER): English
From Humboldt State University
Open Education: English
From Virginia Tech University Libraries

Sample OER Course: LIS2004

LIS2004: Research Strategies for College Students | Prof. Richardson

Sample OER Course: LIS2004

LIS2004: Research Strategies for College Students | Prof. Dillon

Why Do OERs Matter?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index (CPI) Database, the price of college textbooks has steadily increased over the last few years. This graph illustrates the rise in textbook cost from October 2008 to October 2018:

OER Textbooks, Courses, & Materials

BCcampus Open ED: Find, Adopt, Adapt a Textbook
BCcampus’s BC OpenEd Resources page is a good place to start to find both general information about OER and a list of textbooks that have been “created…or…re-created from existing [OER] by BC post-secondary faculty, reviewed by B.C. faculty and made available under a Creative Commons license.”
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 Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.
OpenStax Textbooks
Supported by Rice University, OpenStax has a huge collection of open, peer-reviewed textbooks on a large variety of subjects.
Project Gutenberg
A collection of tens of thousands of digitized books available for download; audiobooks are also available.
AU Press
Athabasca University’s AU Press publishes open access journals and books with a focus on Canada, the North American West, and the Circumpolar North.

Courses

MIT OpenCourseWare: Find Courses
Find courses by topic, MIT course number,
department, or organized into collections, cross-disciplinary topic lists, and translated courses.
Saylor Academy: Course Catalog
Saylor Academy, a non-profit organization committed to providing free and open online courses. Explore Saylor's list of free, online, self-paced courses.
Coursera
An educational platform partnered with dozens of prestigious universities and institutions (including MoMA, Stanford, Yale, the University of Toronto, and the University of London).

Multimedia

Creative Commons Search
A repository of various types of media, including images, music, and videos.
The New York Public Library Digital Collections
"Explore 754,731 items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections.
This site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more."
Digital Public Library of America
"Discover 29,980,685 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.
DPLA brings the wealth of U.S. libraries, archives, and museums to your classroom. If it’s your first time using our site, this guide will help you discover the many great resources DPLA offers educators and students."
Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives
"Co-sponsored by The Ohio State University and Georgia State University, The DALN is a publicly available archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, audio) that together provide a historical record of the literacy practices and values of contributors, as those practices and values change."
Vimeo
Videos with a CC license can be found through Advanced Search options.
Flickr: Creative Commons
Flickr is an “online photo management and sharing application” and many photos are available under CC licenses; Flickr allows searching by type of license.

Supplemental Materials

Supplemental, or ancillary, OER materials can include lecture notes, lesson plans, PowerPoint presentations, assignments, and activities.

OER Commons
A large collection of a variety of types of OER, including textbooks, courses, and ancillary materials.

Other OER Lists

Many universities have research guides related to finding OER and provide lists of various repositories and resources.

Who will find this guide useful?

"A changemaker educator understands the importance of empathy, 
self-identifies as a changemaker, and is committed to working towards 
the betterment of society through education"

OER Workshops

OER Metafinder

Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
"The Mason OER Metafinder helps you find Open Educational Resources. It is a real-time federated search for OER content. MOM's contribution to the progress of Open Education is to concentrate on OER discovery—helping you find current content wherever it resides.
The OER Metafinder performs a simultaneous search across 18 different sources of open educational materials."
University of Victoria: The Online Academic Community
List of Open Textbook Mega Sites

OER Repositories

There are a multitude of OER out there to choose from, including textbooks, courses, multimedia, data, and supplementary materials. These can be found by searching regular search engines (like Google) by using certain keywords but it is much easier to find them through dedicated OER repositories or websites. The examples below are just a sampling of such repositories and websites.

MERLOT
“A curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.”
OER Commons
A large collection of a variety of types of OER, including textbooks, courses, and ancillary materials.
Orange Grove
"The Orange Grove repository is Florida's digital repository for instructional resources. The repository provides an environment for educators to search for, use, remix, share, and contribute educational resources. The repository can also be integrated with your Learning Management Systems (e.g. Canvas, Blackboard, Desire 2 Learn). Discover, contribute, and import repository resources directly from your LMS."
BCcampus OpenED
SOL*R (Shareable Online Learning Resources)
SOL*R is a repository service provided by BCcampus that allows educators to access FREE online learning resources. It facilitates sharing, discovery, reuse, and remixing of a growing collection of content created by BC post-secondary educators.
SOL*R includes learning resources from a wide variety of disciplines and subject areas. Resources range from open textbooks, individual learning activities and tools, all the way to full programs.
Creative Commons
A repository of various types of media, including images, music, and videos.

Where to Build and Remix OER

David Wiley's 5 Rs of Openness,
see The Access Compromise and the 5th R for more information.

OER Commons Open Author
"Add your particular expertise to the wider community. Create Open Educational Resources (OER) with our publishing tool, Open Author. Open Author helps you build Open Educational Resources, lesson plans, and courses (on your own, or with others) — and then publish them, to the benefit of educators and learners everywhere. Learn more about creating on OER Commons and get started."

WikiEducator
The WikiEducator is an evolving community intended for the collaborative:
- Planning of education projects linked with the development of free content
- Development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning
- Work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs
- Networking on funding proposals developed as free content
EDpuzzle
"Make any video your lesson. Pick a video, add your magical touch and track your students' understanding."
YouTube Video Editor
Edit videos and settings:
- Improve uploads on mobile with
- Enhancements
- Swap the audio track on your video
- Remove claimed songs from videos
- Get music from the Audio Library
- Usage restrictions on claimed music
- Use end screens on videos
- Trim your videos
- Blur your videos
TedEd
Transform your classroom with TED-Ed:
- Discover ideas that spark the curiosity of learners
- Create customized lessons for your students
- Inspire your students to share their big ideas

OER Courses

OER English Composition
By Dallas County Community College District
DCCCD Open Education Resource(OER). A collection of resources provided by Dallas TeleLearning, a part of the Dallas County Community College District. Dallas TeleLearning has been producing distance learning courses since 1972. Our dynamic content features some of the most prominent voices in education from colleges and universities around the globe.
MIT OpenCourseWare: Literature Courses
"Literature has been a central experience for the majority of MIT's undergraduates for more than 25 years: over that time approximately 75 percent of all undergraduates have studied the subject.
Designed to serve students majoring, minoring, and concentrating in Literature ... the Literature curriculum at MIT offers a wide range of undergraduate classes at Introductory, Intermediate, and Advanced levels... Many classes focus on literature written in English, though we offer many others covering works in translation from antiquity to yesterday.
Notable for its interdisciplinary variety and for its openness to film and other forms of popular culture, the Literature program is also strong in traditional areas and historical periods such as Renaissance and the 19th Century... Staffed by well-published, influential scholars and creative writers, the Literature faculty is recognized for its superior and committed teaching."