LibGuides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Finding OER

Need some help?

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.

Student Learning Librarian

Ellen Range

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Subjects: Advanced Manufacturing, Agriculture and Natural Resources, Education and Human Services, Health Sciences, Public Safety, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, Transportation

Student Learning Librarian

Linda VanSistine-Yost

she/her/hers

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Subjects: Business and Professional Services, Education and Human Services, Liberal Arts, Social Justice, Student Success

Places to Find Open Educational Resources

Looking specifically for textbooks?

Faculty Select (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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.

Open Textbook Library
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.
OpenStax
Pros: High quality textbooks for introductory level college courses.
Cons: Little content for upper level courses. Not much coverage outside of General Studies.
MERLOT ISBN Search
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?

MERLOT
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?

OASIS
Pros: Searches content from over 60 different sources, you can sort by license type and type of resource.
Cons: Can't sort by education level.
Mason OER Metafinder
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.
OER Commons
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.

Pro/con assessments are adapted from the University of Texas Libraries OER guide, https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/OER/find, used and adapted with permission thanks to a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.

Discipline-Specific OER Resources

Skills Commons [for Career and Technical Fields]
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.
Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning [for ELL]
Resource center funded by the US Department of Education that produces resources for teaching and learning of languages.

For additional discipline specific resources, the lists from Fox Valley and Kirkwood Community College are very good (and why reinvent the wheel?).

Search for Creative Commons Licensed Media

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.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Need some help?

Student Learning Librarian

Student Learning Librarian

Places to Find Open Educational Resources

Looking specifically for textbooks?

Looking for learning objects, media, and ancillaries?

Want to search across multiple collections for all kinds of content?

Discipline-Specific OER Resources

Search for Creative Commons Licensed Media

Images

Video

Music