This guide provides information for learning about open educational resources (OER) and curates resources and information to support OER work at Western Technical College.
Your Student Learning Librarians are happy to help you look for Open Educational Resources (as they are happy to help find you other learning resources that you can use legally). Reach out to them if you would like assistance with:
Finding potential OER textbook options for your discipline or course
Locating potential resources, articles, or media for your classes
Understanding copyright restrictions of media or content you find online
Using, citing, and integrating open resources in presentations, handouts, and other course materials.
Faculty Select is a single interface where faculty and staff can find and preview a variety of Open Educational Resources (OER) to support your courses, as well as search and request library purchase of e-books from top academic publishers. This subscription is provided in partnership with Equity, Inclusion, & Community Engagement to support faculty in identifying and considering OER or other learning materials resources that are no cost to students.
Please contact library@westerntc.edu if you have further questions or need assistance with this resource.
Pros: Large collection of textbooks with published peer reviews by professors, does include some upper level/graduate textbooks, easy to use interface.
Cons: As the name suggests, the content is limited to textbooks.
Pros: High quality textbooks for introductory level college courses.
Cons: Little content for upper level courses. Not much coverage outside of General Studies.
Pros: By using an ISBN, you can find MERLOT Open Educational Resources (OER) that can be used to supplement most textbooks.
Cons: Does not offer textbook replacements, but rather supplementary materials.
Looking for learning objects, media, and ancillaries?
Pros: There are lots of filtering and limiting options when searching, wide range of disciplines represented, wide variety of material types.
Cons: Search interface is a bit clunky.
Want to search across multiple collections for all kinds of content?
Pros: Simultaneously searches multiple repositories, could give you good ideas of other repositories to look in.
Cons: Search interface is difficult to use, search results sometimes take you to the main page of different repository and then you have to redo your search, not easy to determine licenses for items.
Pros: One of the largest OER repositories, covers multiple disciplines, allows for sorting by education level, reuse options, and by standard.
Cons: Rating system is a bit unclear.
Free and open workforce-related learning materials developed by the US Department of Labor's TAACCT program and grant recipients. Contains materials related to agriculture, construction, manufacturing, fabrication, transportation, and other industries.
There are many great resources out there for finding media (images, video, and music) that you can legally use. A Creative Commons license is a good signal for finding usable content. Here are a few of our favorite places for finding media released with a Creative Commons license.
If you are experiencing disability related accessibility issues with any information on this website, please email AccessServices@westerntc.edu or call 608-785-9524.
