Open Educational Resources (OER)

The three State of California Higher Education Systems are working together to provide you easy access to quality FREE and OPEN eTextbooks that everyone and anyone can use for teaching and learning.

Provides customizable courses and course content and textbooks. Sometimes fees apply.

The MERLOT Collection is made up of over 40,000 materials in 19 different material type categories and growing.

Features the materials from 2,015 MIT courses. Many courses provide video lectures and actual recordings of MIT classrooms.

OAister is provided by WorldCat and searches for only open access materials cataloged in libraries worldwide, including dissertations and theses.

OER Commons has forged alliances with over 500 major content partners. Users can search across over 42,000 vetted and fully-indexed OER ensuring a high level of resource relevancy and discovery.

A repository of OER, very useful for finding lectures and videos.

Open resources created and used by Oregon community college and university instructors to reduce textbook costs in their courses.

Contains videos, images, course materials, and textbooks, and modules for learning about OER!

Florida's digital repository of open textbooks, open course ware, and open resources for K12 and Higher Education.

An open-access resource for librarians and faculty. Includes information literacy and research assignments that can be modified for your classes.

Curated by Universities, includes open textbooks, course materials, multimedia, and more.

The Open Textbook Library includes books that have been peer-reviewed by faculty at various institutions. It is a great place to start in your search for an open textbook. It includes books from OpenSTAX, SUNY, and other creators of open textbooks. 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.

Provides peer-reviewed textbooks for use in community college level courses.

The Portal contains over 200,000 titles from VIVA’s shared library collections, open access textbooks, and ebooks available for VIVA to purchase on behalf of public colleges and universities throughout the state.

A Canada-based advocacy organization focused on open education as a tool for increasing learning, equity, and accessibility. BCcampus supports OER creation projects and a curated list of over 200 open textbooks that meet a strict set of criteria for inclusion.

Provides textbooks that are customizable. Some are free, and others require students to pay a fee for items like study guides and downloads.

Open. Free. "LibreTexts offers materials in 12 widely used college-level disciplines from chemistry to humanities. It has 398 textbooks (68,500 pages) in its free online library and covers 154 courses. Since it was established 11 years ago, LibreTexts has been used by 223 million students saving them approximately $31 million." (SPARC)

A nonprofit organization. Free textbooks are developed & peer-reviewed by educators. Also provides modules & other open learning resources.

Established by State University of New York Libraries. Provides faculty-authored, peer-reviewed textbooks and educational resources.

A collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit. 3,080 books with 84,704 pages

Harvests open access eBooks, an provides an option to purchase print copies.

Contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts, and academic books.

JSTOR offers a growing list of Open Access eBooks from respected presses, such as University of California Press, University of Michigan Press, and ANU Press. More than 500 titles are now available at no cost to libraries or users. Check out this page to view a title list and access eBooks!

Provider of free eBooks. Especially useful for literature classes and children's books.

Project MUSE offers open access (OA) books and journals from several distinguished university presses and scholarly societies. Through our open access hosting programs, we are able to offer publishers a platform for their OA content which ensures visibility, discoverability, and wide dissemination. These books and journals are freely available to libraries and users around the world.

Provides a means of searching several image collections that are creative-commons-licensed. In addition to many museum collections, also includes Flickr Images and Wikimedia Commons.

Growing collection of high-resolution images available for free download under the Getty's Open Content Program.

Items from the Library of Congress's digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The Library believes that this content is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use. Each set of content is based on a theme and is first featured on the Library's home page.

TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas. The talks are usually short (18 minutes or less) and powerful, covering all almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages.

Many YouTube videos have creative commons licenses that allow for sharing and reusing. Search for your topic, and then click the FILTER option -- under "Features," select "Creative Commons." under Features. Under "About" or "Show more," look for the License. Note: Always look for obviously pirated material and be aware that YouTube content can disappear.