Open Educational Resources (OER): OER Resources

Focusing on community colleges, and other 2-year institutions of higher education and the first two years (lower division) of 4-year institutions, COT provides links to free textbooks by subjects such as Math, Business, Biology, Chemistry, Engineering & Electronics, English & Composition, Health & Nursing, History, Philosophy Psychology, Music, Art and Science. The site has peer-reviewed more than a hundred OER textbooks and provides links for hundreds more and is a collaborative effort among education, nonprofit and for-profit organizations affiliated with 200 colleges set out to build OER awareness within two-year colleges.

Use this to find links to open textbooks and open courseware from community college courses. Learn about OER, who is using OER and how to share and adopt OER.

This project was initially funded by the Jacobs Foundation.

"The National Science Digital Library provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines..." - NSDL Overview

A project created by ISKME.

Hosted by Rice University and includes peer-reviewed textbooks for Biology, Chemistry, Economics, History, Math, Psychology, and Sociology.

The Open Textbook Library is created and supported by instructional members of the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network. Includes a collection of openly-licensed and free-to-download textbooks for Business, Economics, Social Sciences, Natural and Physical Sciences, Humanities, and more.

"OpenTextBookStore was created by educators frustrated with the time involved in finding adoptable open textbooks, with the hope to make open textbook adoption easier for other faculty. Just to be clear, we are not a publisher. This is just a listing site for publicly available open textbooks, maintained by a teacher. Print copies are made available through third party print-on-demand companies."

Collection of basic to advanced level math textbooks that have been reviewed and approved by the American Institute of Mathematics.

A collection of over 70 openly-licensed textbooks created or revised by faculty at British Columbia's post-secondary institutions.

A collection of language learning resources. It includes materials for Arabic, Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Malayalam, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Yoruba.

This excellent resource is actually a composite of several reputable OER repositories that you can search with one keyword search.

Free access to downloadable books on computer science and statistics. Books are licensed under free licenses allowing professors to copy and distribute text, modify the text, adapt it to their needs, and develop new material.

Created in 1997, Merlot is one of the first and largest collections of online teaching resources. The majority of materials found in Merlot go through an extensive peer-review process.

Undergraduate and graduate level materials focused on the sciences and business with an emphasis on engineering. Some items have links to print online materials for purchase at a reduced cost.

Search major topics and drill down that search to sub-topic or specialty. Also able to limit to format (i.e. video/audio lecture, lecture notes, assessments).

Over 5,000 titles available for free download in PDF format in the sciences, engineering, and medicine.

A free and open collection of teaching resources for Psychology. Sponsored by Diener Education Fund (DEF).

Dynamic digital library and network dedicated to curriculum improvement. Many educational levels, types of learning resources, and subjects.

A directory of 200 open textbooks, arranged by subject.

A group of open textbooks published by University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing, and carry open licenses which allow them to be freely used, adapted, and distributed.

Founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. Written in Java, Flash or HTML5, these can be run online or downloaded to your computer. All simulations are open source.

A nonprofit initiative started in 2008, Saylor Academy's mission is to offer free and open online courses. Their textbook collection is largely comprised of business resources.

Free trigonometry, algebra, and precalculus textbooks which can be downloaded as PDF documents. Developed by mathematics professors Carl Stitz and Jeff Zeager, winners of the University System of Ohio's 2010 Faculty Innovators Award.

Hosted by the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE)

"In 2009, we built the first collection of free online college courses from the world’s top universities. The world of open education has exploded since then, so today our curated lists of online courses are hand selected by our staff to show you the very best offerings by subject area." - Academic Earth

A site for creating custom course packs.

Information on free and open licensing associated with OER.

A nonprofit company whose goal is "to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere." Provides educational resources in several disciplines, and includes test prep.

Open Access Journals

Provides free and open access to a variety of introductory courses used by professors at Yale University.

Public Library of Science - founded in 2001 as a nonprofit Open Access publisher. Its core mission is to aid the progress of science and medicine by easing the communication of research through open access materials.

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition - "...works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education." - SPARC

Open Access Journals