Need help finding OER and affordable textbooks?
Searching for OER and other affordable materials can be intimidating. The good news is librarians are here to help! Contact Online Learning and OER Librarian Tonya Otto (totto@pennwest.edu) if you need help finding OER, and she will find and create a short list of resources to consider for your courses.
You can also contact your Department or Program Librarian to discuss options.
OER Search Tools
- OASIS Developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library, Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 71 different sources.
- Mason OER Metafinder The OER Metafinder performs a search across 18 sources of open educational materials. A distinct feature of the Mason OER Metafinder is the scope of its discovery service, which searches well-known OER repositories like OpenStax, OER Commons, and MERLOT but also sites like HathiTrust, DPLA, Internet Archive, NYPL Digital Collections where valuable but often overlooked open educational materials may be found.
- OER Commons OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. From a single point of access, you can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons' growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER, including full courses, interactive mini-lessons and simulations, adaptations of existing open work, and open textbooks.
- MERLOT The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials and exercises, created by an international community of educators, learners, and researchers. All the materials in MERLOT are reviewed for suitability for retention in the collection, and many undergo the more extensive peer review for which MERLOT is famous.
Open Media
Simulations
- Free Simulations and Virtual Labs A list of free virtual labs and simulations compiled by the Colorado School of Mines.
- Virtual Labs & Simulations A list of virtual labs and simulations from CUNY College of Staten Island. Note: some resources are free but not open.
- PhET Interactive Simulations Interactive simulations for science and math from the University of Colorado - Boulder.
Videos
- TED Talks TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks. TED.com is building a clearinghouse of free knowledge from the world's most inspired thinkers — and a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.
Digital Materials
- Library of Congress Digital Collections Explore digital collections of manuscripts, media, and more from the Library of Congress.
Open Textbooks
- Open Textbook Library Hosted by the University of Minnesota and supported by the Open Textbook Network, the Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
- BCcampus Open Collection BCcampus provides a collection of open textbooks aligned with the highest-enrolled subject areas, as well as a selection of books for trades, technology, and skills training. Books can be browsed by subject area, and many are faculty reviewed.
- OpenStax OpenStax is a nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University, and it's their mission to give every student the tools they need to be successful in the classroom. They publish high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are free online and low cost in print. OpenStax textbooks are being used in 48% of college and universities in the U.S. and in over 100 countries.
- LibreTexts With LibreTexts, students, faculty, and outside experts work together to build freely available open education resources (OER) that supplant conventional paper-based textbooks. LibreTexts currently encompass twelve widely used college-level disciplines from chemistry to humanities with over 68,500 pages.
- Pressbooks Directory This directory provides an index of 1712 books published across 78 Pressbooks networks. Search and filter books by keyword, subject matter, license, and more.
- Milne Open Textbooks Open SUNY Textbooks is an open textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants and SUNY Geneseo.
- GALILEO Open Learning Materials This textbook repository is administrated by Affordable Learning Georgia, an initiative of GALILEO and the University System of Georgia, which aims to reduce the cost of textbooks to students and contribute to their retention, progression, and graduation.
- Wikibooks Wikibooks is a collaborative book authoring website, where users from all over the world work together to write textbooks and other types of instructional books on many topics.
Open Courses
- MIT OpenCourseWare OCW is a free and open publication of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum. Each OCW course includes a syllabus, some instructional material (such as lecture notes or a reading list), and some learning activities (such as assignments or exams). Many courses also have complete video lectures, free online textbooks, and faculty teaching insights.
- Open Learning Initiative The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is a grant-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University, offering innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. In addition to high-quality text, the courses also include practice activities, self-assessments, and graded assessments. All course content is included and structured to support the student’s achievement of clearly defined learning objectives.
- Lumen Learning Lumen works with over 200 colleges and universities across the U.S. to provide sustainable, effective course materials that improve learning. Using open educational resources to create well-designed and low-cost course materials that replace expensive textbooks, Lumen’s OER course materials are engineered to improve subject mastery, course completion and retention.
- Saylor Academy Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative working since 2008 to offer free and open online courses to all who want to learn. They offer nearly 100 full-length courses at the college and professional levels, curated from a trove of free and open online resources by expert educators.
- Open Course Library From the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, Open Course Library is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts. All content is stored in Google docs making it easy to access, browse and download.
- Khan Academy Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. We tackle math, science, computing, history, art history, economics, and more, including K-14 and test preparation (SAT, Praxis, LSAT) content.
- Open Syllabus Search an open archive of syllabi and course curriculum across higher education institutions.
- OpenLearn OpenLearn is a free learning platform, delivered by The Open University as part of its Royal Charter commitment to support the wellbeing of the community. Here you will find almost 1,000 free courses, topical and interactive content, videos and online games.
Other Resources
- CCCOER This page from the Community College Consortium for OER, walks you through the process of searching and identifying OER that may work for you. You can click any of the colored boxes on the bottom to explore their resources by type. Below the boxes they have a link to video tutorials.
- Directory of Open Access Journals Find open access journals & articles from around the world.
- EDUCBA This website provides free tutorials and other resources on Finance, Data Science, Software Development, Project Management, Marketing, Design, Communication, and more.
- Internet Archive A non-profit library of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
- OER by Discipline Directory The BCcampus Open Education OER by Discipline Guide lists a range of open educational resources organized by discipline. This guide is updated as new resources are identified. See the Versioning History page in the Back Matter for the most recent additions.
