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Open Educational Resources

A guide to help faculty find and use Open Educational Resources.

OER in the Social Sciences

The following are curated collections specific to subject areas in the social sciences.

This is not an exhaustive list, and you can also search for subject-specific OER in the search platforms on the Find Open Educational Resources page.

Social Sciences Open Educational Resources

  • OpenStax Textbooks - Social Sciences
    • High quality, peer-reviewed textbooks in American Government, Psychology, Sociology and Economics. Openly licensed and 100% free. To access faculty-only materials, create a free OpenStax account.
  • Open Textbook Library - Social Sciences
    • Complete textbooks that have been reviewed by a variety of college and university faculty, and 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.
  • OER Commons - Social Sciences
    • A large repository that includes all kinds of Open Educational Resources. Use the search limiters to narrow by education level, material type (i.e. Textbooks) and subject.

Psychology

  • NOBA
    • From the Diener Education Fund, founded by former professors emeriti at the University of Illinois
    • Textbooks, PowerPoints, testbanks, and more broken out into modules across the field of psychology

Political Science, International Studies, & Sociology

  • OER Commons - Political Science
    • 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
  • BC Open Campus - Political Science
    • From the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills & Training and the Hewlett Foundation
    • You can filter searches for items that are peer-reviewed and/or adopted
  • OPoliSci
    • From California Community Colleges
    • Collection of course shells, textbooks, activities, assessments, and more across political science and international studies

Education

  • EdTech Books
    • From Brigham Young University
    • Freely available textbooks in the field of education
    • Search/filter by topic, author, peer-review, quality rating, and more 
    • Many of the textbooks meet the 5 R's of OER, while others come with some licensing restrictions (but are still freely available)