LibGuides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Home

Overview

Open Educational Resources (OER) are "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.." From The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

How Can the Library Help?

Schedule a consultation with a reference librarian to discuss how the library can help you find, evaluate, and use open educational resources.

Library Resources as Alternative Textbooks
- Purchase requests
- Direct link creation
Searching for OER
Creating Course Specific Guides
Canvas Embedding
Copyright Assistance

Getting Started with OER

The OER Starter Kit provides instructors with an introduction to the use and creation of OERs.

"Six Steps to OER" by Lesley Library, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Student Perspective

Introduction to Open Educational Resources

OER Search Tools

Open Textbook Library
a good place to start for finding open textbooks.
BCCampus Open Textbooks
collects resources created, reviewed, or adopted by instructors at British Columbia universities.
OER Commons
OER Commons is a public library for OER that includes everything from open data sets to full courses across a range of disciplines and grade levels.
MERLOT
MERLOT is a project of the California State University Center for Distributed Learning. It contains tens of thousands of learning materials, including animations, case studies, textbooks, and presentations.
Open Course Library
The Open Course Library includes syllabi, activities, readings and assessments. All materials are shared under a Creative Commons license, but some materials are paired with low cost textbooks ($30 or under).
SUNY OASIS
SUNY OASIS searches open content from 73 different sources, including MIT Open Courseware, the Open Textbook Library, and Portland State University.
Open Stax College
OpenStax contains peer-reviewed, open source textbooks.

Rubrics for Evaluating OER

Open Textbook Network Review Rubric
rubric used in the Open Textbook Network's Library, developed by BCcampus.
Faculty Guide for Evaluating OER
a checklist of traits to look out for in OER, developed by BCcampus OpenEd Resources (BCOER).
Achieve's Rubrics for Evaluating OER
Achieve.org has developed a rubric with 8 core principles found in high quality OER.