Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost. They are not copyright restricted. OER have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights.
How do you know your options for use or reuse? OER often have a Creative Commons license or other permission to let you know how the material may be used, reused, adapted, and shared.
There are many project sites supporting not only OER for use, but tools to enable you to create or collaborate on creating your own OER.
Major OER Project Hubs
Portals for Finding more OER
Includes many formats, including video, audio, image, and text resources.
Portal to open course materials and video lectures.
Primary source written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.
Multimedia resources, including apps, animations, videos, interactives, and virtual labs.
Online language courses, reference grammars, assessment tools, corpora, etc. Site currently has OER for 17 languages including Arabic, English, Chinese, French, German, and Spanish.
Collection of virtual labs, scenario-based learning activities, tutorials, and concept tests.
Primarily first- and second-year college/university resources.
Video archive of interviews, along with a set of demonstrations. All videos and demonstrations are freely accessible. Requires signup.
Practice exercises and instructional videos. Subject coverage includes math, science, computer programming, history, art history, economics, and more.
Open Education Consortium
Worldwide community of hundreds of higher education institutions and associated organizations.
TED-Ed is TED’s youth and education initiative.
Open-source online homework system for math and science courses. WeBWorK is supported by the MAA and the NSF and comes with a National Problem Library (NPL) of over 20,000 homework problems. Problems in the NPL target most lower division undergraduate math courses and some advanced courses. Supported courses include college algebra, discrete mathematics, probability and statistics, single and multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra and complex analysis.
While the College Open Textbook Collaborative focuses on providing textbooks for Community Colleges, many of the resources they have peer-reviewed would be usable for lower-division undergraduate coursework.
Flat World Knowledge
A resource for open digital textbooks across a wide variety of disciplines.
Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Dental Education Association (ADEA) of peer-reviewed medical education materials. Licensed under Creative Commons open licenses.
"Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project for collaboratively writing open-content textbooks" being developed in a similar process to how Wikipedia was developed.
