Open Educational Resources (OER)

Applied Math and Science Education Repository (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.  AMSER is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the National Science Digital Library, and is being created by a team of project partners led by Internet Scout.

MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.

MIT Open Courseware

Massachusetts Institute of Technology makes ALL of their course materials available online for free. 

MLA Commons Open Repository Excange (CORE) is a library-quality repository for sharing, discovering, retrieving, and archiving digital work.  Digital works available through MLA CORE include the following:  peer-reviewed journal articles, dissertations and theses, works in progress, conference papers, syllabi, abstracts, data sets, presentations, translations, book reviews, maps, charts, books, and book chapters.

OER Commons helps educators, students, and lifelong learners avoid time-consuming searches and find exactly the right materials.  With a single point of access from which they can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons' growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER, everyone can more efficiently find what they need.

CARLI's OER Commons Hub: Open Illinois facilitates the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and supports training, advocacy, and coordination of cooperative effort for the benefit of members of Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) and other Illinois stakeholders. This centralized repository provides materials helpful to academic and research institutions in developing OER and advocating for adoption of OER on their campuses to reduce students costs.

The OER Knowledge Cloud is a repository for journal articles, books, data, research, reports, and any other information about Open Educational Resources (OER).  This searchable database is updated and maintained by professional librarians and volunteers.  The data is fully searchable and all resources are either fully extractable from the Cloud or are linked with a relevant URL.    

OpenStax

Frustrated by the limitations of traditional textbooks and courses, Dr. Richard Baraniuk founded OpenStax (then Connexions) in 1999 at Rice University to provide authors and learners with an open space were they can share and freely adapt educational materials such as courses, books, and reports.

Today OpenStax CNX is a dynamic non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month in the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes.

There are tens of thousands of learning objects, called pages, that are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device anywhere, anytime.  

Everything is available for free thanks to generous support from Rice University and several philanthropic organizations.

The content in OpenStax CNX comes in two formats:  modules, which are like small "knowledge chunks," and collections, which are groups of modules structured into books or course notes, or for other uses.  Open licensing allows for free use and reuse of all content.     

Openverse is an extensive library of free stock photos, images, and audio files that are openly licensed and freely available to use!      

Skills Commons 

The US Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program has created a free and open online library called SkillsCommons containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development.  The Open Educational Resources (OER) are produced by community colleges across the nation and can be found, reused, revised, retained, redistributed and remixed by individuals, institutions, and industry.

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. The California State University/MERLOT team works with other TAACCCT partners to support the TAACCCT grantees in the creation and contribution of quality OER that are stored in the SkillsCommons online library.

SoftChalk Share is an Open Education Resource, learning object repository with thousands of free learning materials, created by educators.

The World History Encyclopedia is a repository of peer-reviewed resources about ancient history topics in various formats including interactive content, videos, mobile apps, and teaching resources.  Articles are also available in audio format.  The World History Encyclopedia is published by an independent, non-profit organization with a mission to engage people with cultural heritage and improve history education worldwide.   

Writing Commons

Writing Commons (WC) is a peer-reviewed open education resource (OER) for college-level writers. Writing Commons was developed from a highly regarded text into one of the most heavily used open textbooks on the web.  Following a crowd-sourcing process, Writing Commons now offers an interactive and comprehensive introduction to college-level writing. 

Open Washington OER Repository locate and access a wide variety of OER repositories and aggregators in one spot and organized by the following resource types:  open images, open textbooks, open course materials, and open video and audio.