Off-Campus (Remote) Library Services: Finding Open Educational Resources
Guide to library services while working remotely.
Finding Open Educational Resources (OER)
Finding the right Open Educational Resource (OER) is the most challenging part of using OERs for your course. The resources listed on this page can help you find an OER in your subject area. The bad news: you may not find an exact match. The good news: OERs are usually shared in such a way that you’ll be able to edit the OER to better meet your student needs. You can also mix, match, and customize multiple OERs like an open course pack. --adapted from Emory Libraries
Abbey K. Elder's "The OER Starter Kit" provides helpful tips for starting your OER search, including:
- Identify keywords related to your course and its learning objectives.
- Use these keywords to search for relevant OER.
- Start with a broad search in your discipline and then limit results.
- Remember that it's ok to gradually introduce OER into your course if you can't find all the resources you're looking for.
Where to find OER
- OpenStaxA nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University, publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed , openly licensed college textbooks that are freely available online and low cost in print.
- MERLOTA free, international, and open peer reviewed collection of OERs and faculty-developed services.
- Open Textbook LibraryThe Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
- OER CommonsA resource to support and build a knowledge base around the use and reuse of OER. Includes resources for curriculum alignment, quality evaluation, social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing.
- SUNY’s Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS)Search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier by searching multiple sources for OER and other open content at once.
- Mason OER MetafinderWhen you search the Metafinder, you’re searching across 21 different sources of open educational materials, including well-known OER repositories like OpenStax and OER Commons, as well as sites like HathiTrust, DPLA, Internet Archive and NYPL Digital Collections.
- MIT OpenCoursewareMIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content.
- Open MichiganThe home for all things open at the University of Michigan—including expertise and services for open educational resources, open data, and open publications.
- Open WashingtonAn OER network created for Washington State Community and Technical College (WA CTC) faculty. This website is dedicated to providing easy pathways for faculty to learn, find, use and apply OER.
- Community of Online Research Assignments (CORA)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. Most are library-focused modules.
Subject-specific repositories
- Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL)COERLL's mission is to produce and disseminate Open Educational Resources (OER) for the Internet public (e.g., online language courses, reference grammars, assessment tools, corpora, etc.).
- American Institute of Mathematics Approved TextbooksList of open textbooks by course title that have been judged to meet the evaluation criteria set by the AIM editorial board.
- ChemCollectiveChemistry
- LearnChemEChemical Engineering
- NOBAPsychology
- Open Geography EducationGeography
- Engineering Technology: Simulations for LearningEngineering, Physics
Can't find the right OER material for your course? Contact Fondren Digital Scholarship Services or your Subject Librarian for assistance.
Evaluating OER
Not all OERs are created equal. Here are some resources to help you evaluate the quality and appropriateness of an OER.
- Selecting TextbooksSet of criteria for selecting open textbooks from Affordable Learning Georgia.
- Achieve OER RubricsTo help states, districts, teachers, and other users determine the degree of alignment of Open Educational Resources (OER) to college- and career-ready standards and to determine other aspects of quality of OER, Achieve has developed eight rubrics in collaboration with leaders from the OER community. Achieve partnered with OER Commons to develop an online evaluation tool to allow users to apply these rubrics and evaluate the quality of instructional resources.
- Achieve Open Educational Resources Evaluation Tool HandbookThis handbook will guide a user through the process of evaluating an online resources using Achieve OER Evaluation Tool, which is hosted on OERCommons.org.
- Open Textbook AdoptionOpenStax guide to adopting open textbooks; includes section on reviewing textbooks.
- OER Accessibility ToolkitIn addition to quality, the accessibility of OER is an important factor to consider. This toolkit from the University of British Columbia provides suggestions for making work more accessible.
- Open Educational Resources (OERs): Evaluating OERsOpen textbook review criteria from Furman University.
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