Library: Public Domain, Creative Commons, and Other Online Resources: Finding and Evaluating OER

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Open Textbooks

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.

Complete Courses

OER Repositories

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.

Open Course Library
Collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments.
Lumen Learning
Supports faculty in identifying and selecting high quality OER, aligning these to learning outcomes, and assembling them to create OER-based courses.
Openstax CNX (formerly Connexions)
Contains textbooks, articles, supplements, and other learning resources that can be read online or downloaded for free.
MERLOT II
Free, peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials maintained by the California State University System.
Merlot System
Merlot'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 Education 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.
Applied Math and Science Education Repository (AMSER)
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
Open educational resources, data, and and publications.
MIT YouTube Channel
Recorded lectures from MIT.
OER Commons
Provides college-level open textbooks from higher education institutions around the world.
Khan Academy
Recorded lectures from the Khan Academy.

OER by Discipline

LInk to OERs by Discipline

Evaluating OER

Faculty can evaluate open educational resources using many of the same methods they use to review textbooks and other materials for their courses. They can ask questions such as:

Does an OER cover the content you'd like your students to learn in the course?
How accessible is the OER? Does it challenge your students, or is it TOO challenging for them?
To what extent can you modify the OER? Can you combine it with another OER?
What kind of license governs the OER?
What kind of attribution for the OER do you have to provide?
Does the OER come in a format students can access easily? Can they print it at a low cost? Does it require special software?
Is the OER peer reviewed?

Evaluating Rubrics, Checklist, and Tool

Achieve's OER rubrics [pdf]
Achieve.org has developed eight OER rubrics as well as an evaluation tool to help users determine the quality of an OER. A summary of this PDF is also available.
Achieve Open Educational Resources Evaluation Tool Handbook [pdf]
This handbook, created by Rodney Birch of George Fox University, will guide a user through the process of evaluating an online resource.
iRubric: Evaluating OER Rubric
This document, developed by Sarah Morehouse with help from Mark McBride, Kathleen Stone, and Beth Burns, includes questions to ask about the OER you are thinking of using. This rubric is is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
OER Evaluation Checklist [pdf]
From the University of Illinois.
Open Textbook Review Criteria
A rubric developed by BCcampus to guide assessment of OER textbooks.

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Public Domain, Creative Commons, and Other Online Resources

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