| The fastest way to start using OER in your classes would be to adopt an existing OER textbook. Find a textbook that would work for you using some of the resources in this guide, like "SUNY Open Textbooks", or "OpenStax". SUNY Online and SUNY OER Services collaborate on a variety of initiatives that leverage the resources and expertise available to faculty interested in Open Educational Resources (OER) from exploration to adoption to creation. Lumen Learning and SUNY OER Services have many ready to adopt courses. Please contact Faye Starman at starmafl@cobleskill.edu (x5894) for more information. |
Some OER Resources
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SUNY OER Services
Works directly with SUNY Campuses and faculty to provide assistance and knowledge to support the adoption of OER and sustained use of OER as drivers of favulty choice and student successSUNY Open Textbooks
Peer reviewed open textbooksA centrally managed online digital repository that stores, indexes, and makes available scholarly and creative works of SUNY faculty, students, and staff across SUNY campuses.
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Lumen Learning CatalogA listing of courses on the Lumen Learning platform. These are open textbooks broken down into modules that sometimes include supplementary materials.
If you are interested in using Lumen's materials for one of your courses, we can get you a login so that you can actually edit the content in the book itself, making it a truly customizable resource. -
OER CommonsOER Commons is an OER repository that has materials about many subjects from preschool to graduate school level. The site also has tools for creating your own OERs.
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Pressbooks Support GuidesPressbooks, Wordpress for books, is a popular platform for open textbooks. See these support guides for information about how to create, adopt, and share content.
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OpenStaxSponsored by Rice University, OpenStax supports open textbooks on a variety of subjects for general education courses.
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MERLOT IIMERLOT II is an OER repository that contains many types of OER in a wide variety of subjects. Some materials have been peer reviewed.
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College Open TextbooksA collection of open textbooks and other OERs
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MIT OpenCourseWareOpen course materials from classes taught at MIT.
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Open Textbook LibraryA collection of open textbooks curated by the University of Minnesota
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Teaching CommonsThe Teaching Commons brings together educational materials from colleges and universities across the US.
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Open CultureA wide variety of free educational and cultural content including multimedia.
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Project GutenbergA large collection of public domain literature available for free in a variety of formats.
Evaluating OER Quality
There are various lists and rubrics for evaluating OER available online. Five common elements of these rubrics include:
- That the content of the OER is accurate and free of major errors and spelling mistakes
- That the license of the content can be used or altered for the course's needs
- That the OER is clearly written and appropriate for the students' level of understanding
- That the accessibility of the content is appropriate for all students
Examples of rubrics for evaluating OER are available below:
Evaluating OER Accessibility
Besides their general quality, the accessibility of OER is also an important factor to consider, especially in light of the online nature of most OER. Information about creating and evaluating the accessibility of OER is listed below.
NEW SEARCH TOOL for OER Open Content (added 9/18)
OASIS (Openly Available Sources Integrated Search)
OASIS includes the ability to limit search results by license, type, subject, source, and reviews available. Through OASIS, you can also suggest new sources to be added to the catalog and/or share items of interest through email.
Creative Commons search
Search the web with Creative Commons filtered search engine to find web sites, articles, videos, images, and other resources licensed for sharing.
From Visually.
Important: Depending on the subject you teach, finding a variety of OER in your discipline may be difficult. If you are having issues locating OER in your discipline, contact your subject liaison. (see list of library liaisons.)
A few collections with discipline-specific resources available online are listed below:
OER in the Sciences
- American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) Includes AIM-approved texts and learning materals
- Applied Math and Science Education Repository (AMSER) AMSER is "a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use." It was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.
- BioInteractive BioInteractive contains short films, virtual labs, exercises, lessons plans, and more for Biology, Ecology, Genetics, and more. (These resources are NOT fully open but can be reused for educational purposes. See the site's Terms of Use for more information.)
- ChemCollective Includes tutorials, online courses, and more. From Carnegie Mellon
- NanoHUB Includes teaching materials, short courses, and more; from the National Science Foundation
- NCBI Bookshelf Includes life sciences and health open access texts and other resources; from the National Library of Medicine's National Center for Biotechnology Information
- Open Source Physics (OSP) OSP provides resources for students "to engage in physics, computation, and computer modeling." It also includes resources for Astronomy.
- PhET Includes “interactive simulations for science and math.” Can be useful for mathematics, physics, engineering, and other subjects.
- Plant & Soil Sciences eLibrary Lessons, animations, and other educational materials related to agriculture, horticulture, plant physiology, and other topics.
- Science Forward Science Forward provides videos, readings, syllabi, and other resources for undergraduate programs in the Sciences. (All materials licensed under CC BY NC SA 4.0 licenses.)
OER in the Arts & Humanities
- The American Yawp "A Free and Online, Collaboratively Built American History Textbook" (Locke & Wright et al, CC BY SA-4.0)
- Digital Culture Books Full-text online books from University of Michigan Press; titles focus on digital humanities, writing, digital rhetoric, science fiction, and more.
- Online Writing Lab at Excelsior College Includes variety of interactive multimedia activities such as quizzes, videos, interactive PDFs, and games designed to provide support for writers as they begin the process of writing for college.
- Open Humanities Press Books from "an international community of scholars, editors and readers with a focus on critical and cultural theory," based in London.
OER in the Social Sciences
- Education Resources From the Teaching Commons; education-focused OER are collected and organized here by format, including textbooks, course sites, syllabi, course materials, K-12 curricula, and more.
- LGBT+ Healthcare 101 A series of digitally available interviews with LGBT+ volunteers at the University of Edinburgh about their experiences and observations concerning healthcare for LGBT+ individuals.
- NOBA Project A collection of open textbooks for the field of Psychology. Requires a Login but no fees.
- Open Access Queer Studies An online collection of journals, books, and other online resources which can be used for studies in Gender & Sexuality.
- Open Knowledge Repository A repository with online books and other resources related to topics in Political Science and Sociology.
Most of the icons used throughout this guide are from icons8. Their use/reuse guidelines are here.
Open Access is not the same as OER. Open Access materials are still under traditional copyright. They cannot be copied, shared, or remixed. The thing that makes them distinctive is that, unlike traditional journal articles, you can read them on the web without having a subscription or paying for a download. This is important for the free flow of scholarly communication and the sustainability of libraries; however it doesn't allow you to embed the content in your course. You can still only link to Open Access articles, not copy or share them.
Below, you'll find a list of resources helpful for finding open access journals. If you are not using a curated list of open access journals, but rather searching on the open web for open access journals, you may get results that include predatory / low-quality titles.
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Directory of Open Access JournalsThe aim of the DOAJ is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals, thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The DOAJ aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content.
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Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA)OASPA offers a forum for bringing together the entire community of Open Access journal publishers and represents the interests of Open Access (OA) journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines.
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SHERPASHERPA is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research. SHERPA services and the SHERPA Partnership are both based at the Centre for Research Communications at the University of Nottingham.
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Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)SPARC is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication.
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PLOS - Public Library of SciencePLOS was founded in 2001 as a nonprofit Open Access publisher, innovator and advocacy organization with a mission to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.