Open Educational Resources Guide: Home

This article describes steps to integrating OER into your curriculum, and provides link to other helpful OER information.

OER is positively affecting textbook costs and saving students money.

This edited volume includes help for institutions in working with OER and other low cost options and then offers case studies for using OER.

This article discusses some of the positive effects OER has on enrollment and retention.

This article discusses some of the major advantages of OER over traditional course materials, going beyond just cost.

An overview of some of the exciting things that are happening with OER around the country and the world.

The California Zero Cost initiative aims to have as many classes as possible using OER. This article talks about the positive impact this had had on students.

Audit report presented to the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education found that North Dakota University System Open Educational Resources Initiative saved students over $1.1 million in Fall 2017

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article that discusses the need for higher education institutions to embrace creating and using open educational resources.

This article focuses on some of the problems that are occurring as institutions try to create free courses and materials for courses.

Short article outlining some of the advantages of using OER.

"A handbook for faculty interested in practicing open pedagogy by involving students in the making of open textbooks, ancillary materials, or other Open Educational Resources."

Survey reports that use of OER is rising but there are still barriers to its widespread use.

Report in Inside Higher Ed on the same survey as reported on in "Use of Free Textbooks..." link.

This very brief article outlines what is available in Ebooks Minnesota

Article talks about groups of librarians working together to advance OER in their state.

Short article about New Jersey Institute of Technology's open textbook initiative.

New study reveals that OER courses and degrees benefit student retention and completion, improve faculty engagement, and result in cost savings for students.

Videos of sessions from an online conference on Open Educational Resources

"In this webinar, Michelle Barron-Lutzross of bepress Consulting Services discusses ways to integrate OER into the institutional repository, a strategy that allows libraries to play a pivotal role in the success of OER on campus. She parses recent research on OER, describes strategies for faculty awareness and engagement, and shares examples from successful OER collections in several IRs."

Students spend a lot of money on textbooks. Alternatives to the expensive textbooks that come from commercial publishers are open educational resources, or OER. But, are these free resources as effective or of the same quality as textbooks? The research says yes. This video summarizes the available research synthesized in Hilton, J. (2016) Open educational resources and college textbook choices: a review of research on efficacy and perceptions. Education Tech Research and Development, 64(4), 573 - 590.

This calculator helps you determine the impact of adopting OER instead of commercial textbooks.

Sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (IKSKME). The OER Commons provides a platform for the creation, review, and use of OER resources for all levels. Site includes textbooks, lesson plans, activities/labs, lectures, syllabi, interactive, and other types of sources.

Developed by the California State University Center for Distributed Learning and now run by a consortium of universities, this system hosts OER content that is peer-reviewed and for higher education. This site has textbooks and many other resource types. Each item is reviewed by a peer-reviewer and by individuals.

Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.

Started at Rice University, Openstax provides textbooks and "pages" that contain exercises or lesson plans.

Real time search across 21 different sources of open educational materials.

SUNY has created a variety of OER full courses. This includes courses across many subject areas. Courses include faculty resources such as powerpoints, test banks and other ancillary materials.

This is a group of links to ancillary content for OER.

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 78 different sources and contains 317,311 records.

OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.

This system includes not only textbooks but supplementary materials such as homework exercises, worksheets, visualizations, simulations, exemplars/case studies, and experiments. They also map for purchase textbooks and create free textbooks using the outlines of commercial books.

Open Educational Resources from all the Institutional Repositories hosted on bepress.

California Open Online Library for Education provides open online resources including information such as ways to evaluate open resources for accessibility

List of sources of OER materials. Not a repository in itself, it links to many other repositories. It also has educational material to learn about OER and how to adopt it and adapt it.

A variety of OER content published by Portland State University.

Sponsored by the Saylor Foundation, they put together open online courses on a variety of topics using open content. Content in the courses is reviewed by subject consultants.

Affordable Learning Solutions enables faculty to choose and provide more affordable, quality educational content for their students. Developed by California State University system.

GALILEO Open Learning Materials brings together open educational resources throughout the University System of Georgia, including open textbooks and ancillary materials.

This repository is administrated by Affordable Learning Georgia, an initiative of GALILEO and the University System of Georgia.

The goal of the project was to make higher education more accessible by reducing student cost through the use of openly licensed textbooks.

Primary source materials in a wide variety of subjects contributed by libraries, museums, and archives.