All kinds of media and genres can be OERs, including books, articles, videos, software, syllabi, educational kits, and more. This page has links to specific OER repositories and OER search tools, which may include different material types. Textbooks are the most popular OERs, and they have a separate textbooks page here.
OERs are most often give flexible copyright licenses, like Creative Commons or Public Domain, to remove restrictions on their use and discrimination. For more information on Creative Commons copyrights and what they mean, visit the Creative Commons page on our Copyright guide.
Online OERs
- H20 CasebooksH2O offers a platform for making and sharing open-licensed casebooks and other Law course materials online. It's developed and maintained today by the Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School Library.
- Lumen LearningLumen curates and creates OER to develop sets of course materials aligned with learning outcomes for general education courses. It also provides services around OER to make it simple to use and more effective at supporting student learning. All Lumen-developed content carries a CC-BY license.
- MERLOTThe MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and more. All the materials in MERLOT are reviewed for suitability for retention in the collection. MERLOT is a program of the California State University.
- MIT OpenCourseWareMIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. Most content is under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) Creative Commons licence.
- NobaPrimarily for psychology resources, Noba is a free online platform that provides textbooks and educational materials under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.
- The Orange GroveThe Orange Grove is Florida's Open Education Resource Repository, funded by the state of Florida.
- PhET, University of Colorado BoulderPhET has free online physics, chemistry, biology, earth science and math simulations. All simulations are open educational resources available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY).
- SkillsCommonsSkillsCommons is a free and open online library containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development. SkillsCommons.org is designed and managed by the California State University and its MERLOT program for the Department of Labor’s TAACCCT program under a 4+ year cooperative agreement.
- UCI OpenUCI Open comes from the University of California, Irvine, is a web-based repository of various UC Irvine courses and video lectures from UC Irvine faculty, seminar participants, and instructional staff. Its content is available for free under a CC licence.
OER Finders
- EBSCO Faculty SelectA new special version of EBSCOhost made specifically to help faculty find Open Educational Resources and DRM-free e-books. Highly recommended!
- MOM: The Mason OER MetafinderFrom George Mason University Libraries, this searches all kinds of OER content in a large number of repositories.
- OASISOpenly 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 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records. OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
- OER CommonsFrom a single point of access in OER Commons, you can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons' growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER. It is a search portal for finding many kinds of OERs.
- Teaching CommonsThe Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.
