Open Educational Resources

There are many search engines and repositories for OER. Rather than list all of them here, the following are some of the most comprehensive collections featuring reviewed materials.

For more comprehensive lists of OER sources, please see the University of Washington's guide to OER or the University of Pittsburgh's guide to OER.

• Merlot
  • From Cal State University Long Beach
  • Peer reviewed by discipline-specific editorial boards
  • Open textbooks, content, learning activities, quizzes, technology platforms, etc.
    • Includes fee-based content as well, but you can filter this out
  • Advanced search enables you to search by discipline, audience, material type, and more
• OASIS
  • From SUNY Geneseo
  • Enables you to filter to only peer-reviewed content
  • Open textbooks, full courses, content, learning activities, quizzes, technology platforms, etc.
  • Enables you to filter by subject, content type, and format
• OER Commons
  • From the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)
  • Open textbooks, content, learning activities, assessments, etc.
  • Enables you to filter by subject, content type, format, and educational standard
• Open Educational Resources Initiative
  • From the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges
  • All content has either been peer-reviewed or adopted by selected for use by faculty in the California community college system
  • Content grouped by discipline
• Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
  • From George Mason University
  • Searches across 22 different sources of OER including the ones listed above, but also sources like HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and NYPL collections

Most of the search tools on the Repositories/Search Engines list enable you to search specifically for open textbooks, but the sources here are specifically for open textbooks:

• Open Textbook Library
  • From the Open Education Network at the University of Minnesota
  • All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. Includes the OpenStax collection.
  • Around 60% of textbooks have been reviewed by faculty
• LibreTexts
  • From the University of California - Davis
  • Peer-reviewed textbooks in numerous disciplines
  • Includes features like 3D modeling of concepts, collaborative annotations, importing into Canvas
  • OER remixer enables you to adapt content to your own courses
• BC Campus Open Textbooks
  • From the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills & Training and the Hewlett Foundation
  • Hundreds of open textbooks in various disciplines
  • You can filter searches for items that are peer-reviewed and/or adopted
• OpenStax
  • From Rice University
  • 20+ peer-reviewed textbooks in common undergraduate subjects like Algebra, History, and Psychology
• Wikibooks
  • From the Wikimedia Foundation
  • Nearly any user can create/edit any page within Wikibooks, but all content is subject to moderation by its community of volunteer editors and administrators
  • Wikibooks and Wikipedia are excellent platforms for open pedagogy where students become knowledge creators as opposed to simply consumers
• Open Education North Carolina
  • Free, open textbooks that have been curated for the most frequently taught courses across North Carolina's 2 and 4-year colleges and universities

Several of the resources in Top Recommendations for OER offer full courses. The following resources are devoted to complete courses, including syllabi, readings, assessments, and other materials that you can use or adapt for your own courses.

• MIT OpenCourseWare
  • Full online courses and other resources from MIT professors
  • Browse and search courses and content by discipline, topic, and features
• Saylor.org
  • Full online courses
  • Most of the content is licensed under a CC BY license, so you can reuse or adapt content as needed for your own courses.
  • Mix of original content from Saylor and other free content, so license permissions vary, but licenses are indicated on the content itself
  • Saylor-developed final exams are not licensed for reuse
• Open Michigan
  • Full online courses and other content from University of Michigan faculty
  • Much of the content is governed by CC licenses that enable you to adapt content as needed

• Creative Commons Search
  • Search engine that enables you to search for resources based on license restrictions
  • Very useful for finding openly licensed images
• Wikimedia Commons
  • Historical and contemporary images contributed by participants
  • Millions of high-resolution images of art, architecture, design, people, historical events, diagrams, maps, and more.
• National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery
  • ​​​​​​​Photos and graphic representations of scientific concepts from various disciplines
• Flickr Creative Commons
  • ​​​​​​​Images provided by Flickr users that are available under a Creative Commons license.
• Getty Open Content Search
  • ​​​​​​​Search for open content across the Getty's collections