Research Guides: Affordable Textbooks and Course Materials: Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Access Collections

Open access textbooks and course materials are openly-licensed digital resources that are offered for free online. Most of these open access works allow anyone to read, copy, distribute, or modify the content at no cost. Open access texts and course materials are now seen as affordable alternatives to traditional learning materials and can be adopted as a course text or used as recommended or supplemental course materials.

Free the Textbook image used under CC BY http://oerconsortium.org

Looking for Open Educatonal Materials? Try these sites:

Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 21 different sources of open educational materials. From George Mason University.
MERLOT
MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community. MERLOT is a program of the California State University System partnering with education institutions, professional societies, and industry.
MN State Opendora
Opendora, developed by PALS, is a digital archive for open educational resources that serves as a central repository for Minnesota State faculty and librarians to leverage licensed open educational resources (OER) with the ability to access, load, and share material. Opendora allows the storage of or linking to, course content including textbooks, lecture notes, syllabi, reading lists, and videos.
National Science Digital Library
The National Science Digital Library provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines
OASIS
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 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records. OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
OER Commons
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that can be freely used at no cost. Unlike fixed, copyrighted resources, OER have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights. Collection contains textbooks, online lessons, courses, and learning materials.
Open Textbook Library (University of MN)
These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. They 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.
OpenStax
OpenStax is a nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University. They provide peer-reviewed, open source textbooks written by professional content developers who are experts in their fields.