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Research Guides: OER

Open Educational Resources logo

Discover OERs for your subject

TML librarians have been scouring OER repositories to find quality free digital texts relevant to CU courses.

OER Defined

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OER range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation."   - UNESCO

How to Find OER

OpenStax
Founded at Rice University, OpenStax produces textbook projects that are peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable and accurate, meet the scope and sequence requirements of each course, are supported by instructor ancillaries, and are available with the latest technology-based learning tools.

Open Textbook Library
OTL is a repository for open textbooks, many of which 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 library currently includes over 1,100 textbooks, with more being added all the time.

Pressbooks Directory
Pressbooks is an OER publishing platform used by many institutions. The Directory is an index of 2,344 books published across 96 Pressbooks networks.

OER Commons
OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. 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.

Open NJ: New Jersey Open Educational Resources
Created by VALENJ, Open NJ is a statewide repository for its higher education community to share OER and expand our knowledge and adoption of OER.

OASIS (Openly Available Sources Integrated Search)
Developed by SUNY Geneseo, OASIS is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 90 different sources and contains 364,699 records.

MERLOT
The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder webpages, together with associated comments, and bookmark collections, all intended to enhance the teaching experience of using a learning material.

Open Course Library
A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs making it easy to access, browse and download.

Mason OER MetaFinder
Developed by George Mason University, OER Metafinder performs a simultaneous search across 21 different sources of open educational materials.

LibreTexts
LibreTexts is an initiative developed at the University of California, Davis, in collaboration with several other colleges and universities. Comprised of nearly 400 OERs across 12 broad academic disciplines, many LibreTexts include embedded multimedia, dynamic figures, and ancillary materials like lab experiments and manuals, worksheets, interactive visualizations, case studies, etc.

Noba Project
Noba offers a series of open educational modules covering introductory psychology, developed by university professors. Use them as-is or customize them to fit your needs. Instructor manual, PowerPoint presentations, and test bank available for many modules.

AIM-Approved Open Math Textbooks
The editorial board of the American Institute of Mathematics has compiled lists of open textbooks that meet its evaluation criteria, grouped according to course title.

Smithsonian Open Access
Download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images— nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items are available—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.