LibGuides: Open Educational Resources at MDC: Overview: Finding OER

Open Textbook Collection

Open textbooks are free, online learning materials with Creative Commons licenses. Many of the collections will have links to the same books, but each will have a particular focus, and items you can't find in other collections.

Openstax College
Initiated by Rice University, their free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed to ensure they meet the scope and sequence requirements of college courses.
Open Textbook Library
Created by the University of Minnesota to support development of high-quality open textbooks in various subjects.
OER Commons
Provides college-level open textbooks from higher education institutions around the world.
Saylor Academy
Collection of freely available open textbooks for download, online reading, and sharing.
College Open Textbooks
Focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open and peer-reviewed textbooks to more than 2,000 community colleges.
MERLOT Open Textbook
Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) is a curated resource of free and online textbooks for use in teaching and learning.
BC Campus OpenEd
Open textbooks for the 40 highest enrolled first- and second-year subject areas in the British Columbia's public, post-secondary system.
OpenTextbookStore
A free collection of mathematics-related open textbooks. Includes supplements and a link to order print copies of the book.
Textbook Equity
Creator, publisher, distributor, and seller of open textbooks and ancillary materials to college-level students.
State University of New York (SUNY) Open Textbooks
With the initiative of the SUNY Libraries, Open SUNY Textbooks publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed textbooks for use in higher education.
Global Text Project
Joint venture between the University of Georgia and University of Denver business schools. Provides a free library of thousands of texts on various topics.
Bookboon
European eBook publisher with 1000+ textbooks freely available to download. E-books are primarily in business/economics, engineering/natural sciences and IT.

Directory of Open Access Journals

The Directory of Open Access Journals was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open access journals and today contains approximately 10,000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.

Museums

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Search the web for museum sites specific to your topic; look for a link to their educational resources

Podcasts

OER Repositories

OER repositories contain more than just open textbooks. All content featured within these pages is free but usage rights vary. Materials in these repositories are released under a Creative Commons license while some are in the public domain.

MERLOT II
Free, peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials maintained by the California State University System.
Lumen Learning
Supports faculty in identifying and selecting high quality OER, aligning these to learning outcomes, and assembling them to create OER-based courses.
OER Commons
Funded by ISKME, OER Commons is a library of OER materials containing over 50,000 high-quality OER.
Openstax CNX (formerly Connexions)
Contains textbooks, articles, supplements, and other learning resources that can be read online or downloaded for free.
Open Course Library
Collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments.
The OrangeGrove
Florida's digital repository for instructional resources.
California Open Online Library for Education (Cool4Ed)
Library of free open source textbooks and other materials from the State of California Higher Educations Systems.
Open Courseware Consortium
Free and open collection of high-quality learning materials presented in the form of courses.
MIT OpenCourseWare
A web-based publication of materials from thousands of MIT courses. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
AMSER (Applied Math and Science Education Repository)
Portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in community and technical Colleges.
Internet Archive
This library contains downloadable free courses, video lectures, and supplemental materials from universities across the globe.
Open Michigan
A hub that helps people find, use, and create openly licensed content and provides a space to share their educational content. through partnerships with community of schools & colleges, campuses, faculty, students and alumni.

Mason OER Metafinder

The Mason OER Metafinder searches seventeen targets in real-time, instantly returning the top several hundred or so relevant hits from each site. Because it is a real-time search, it can take a bit longer than searches of pre-indexed content; however, as compensation the results returned are absolutely up-to-the-minute for each search target. Additional results continue to trickle in as the search continues running and you begin examining your results.

Why Open Textbooks?

Alternative free Etextbooks

Openstax has E-Textbooks by course for introductory Math, Science, History, Economics, Political Science, Social Sciences & Business courses. Click on the document below if your students do not have access to your current course textbook, and/or you would like to explore more affordable course material (Cost ZERO).

OpenStax Free Etextbooks

Library E-Books as Textbook Alternative

Library E-books can also be used as textbook alternative or supplemental materials to enhance delivery of your course. Chapters or pages within an e-book can be downloaded and linked.

OER Images and Public Domain

Want to use an image in your project but worried about copyright? There is a wealth of images on the web that can be used or reproduced without restriction.

Search websites for images you can share, use, and remix. Creative Commons allows creators of works to release them into the public domain or license works by placing some restrictions on their use.