LibGuides: Open Educational Resources (OER): OER Textbooks and Repositories

Featured Resource

MERLOT II
MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community. It is a highly valued resource because the content is peer reviewed by faculty
Defining "Open" - Five Rs
What does it mean to say that a resource is "open". It should offer all or most of the 5 Rs

openNCCC This link opens in a new window
openNCCC contains over 600 free e-textbooks and thousands of high-quality digital content resources in a variety of formats. Content is searchable and sharable and aligned to the NCCCS Combined Course Catalog. Content items are further enhanced by the NCBrain coded into each searchable object.

Open Textbook Adoption Guide
Provides an overview of OER and open textbooks and helps faculty by offering a concrete process for open textbook adoption.
Searching for OERs

OER Guides From Other Libraries

Finding OER Resources

Many organizations and higher education institutions are developing web pages, Lib Guides, textbooks, evaluation tools, etc. for OER stakeholders to use, to research, and to gather Open Educational Resources.

The videos below from Florida Virtual Campus provide introductory information about finding existing OERs; using, revising and properly attributing others' openly licensed work, creating and licensing new OERs, and assessing your legal risk of using "all rights reserved" copyrighted works under fair use.

OER Resource List

K-12

K-12 Open Education Resources
This guide contains information that will help you locate OER resources to use for K-12 instruction.
Engage NY
Common Core Curriculum Lesson Plans

Agriculture

Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education
Sustainable Agriculture Textbooks
University of California at Santa Cruz - Teaching Direct Marketing and Small Farm Viability
Growing crops is just one step in running a successful farm—making the farm or market garden economically viable requires another suite of skills, including finding land, planning what crops to grow, ensuring food safety, marketing the crops, and managing income, expenses, and labor.
US Department of Agriculture - National Agriculture Library - Southern Regional Aquaculture Center Videos
The Southern Regional Aquaculture Center (SRAC) is one of five regional aquaculture centers established by Congress. Projects that are developed and funded by SRAC are based on industry needs and are designed to directly impact commercial aquaculture development in the Southern Region.

Nursing

International Journal of Nursing Sciences - Open Courseware and Massive Open Online Courses
The article focuses on two types of educational resources: open courseware (OCW) and open online courses (MOOCs) for nurse educator, researcher or practitioner in nursing education.

Workforce

Skills Commons
Explore free and open educational resources in Workforce Development

Repository

MERLOT
The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder webpages, together with associated comments, and bookmark collections, all intended to enhance the teaching experience of using a learning material.
OER Commons
Similar to MERLOT it offers all types of learning materials but it is not exclusive to higher education.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books 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
Similar to MERLOT it offers all types of learning materials but it is not exclusive to higher education.
OpenStax College Textbooks
OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University, and it’s their mission to improve student access to education. Their first openly licensed college textbook was published in 2012, and their library since scaled to more than 20 books for college and AP courses used by hundreds of thousands of students.
Open SUNY Textbooks
The process to ensure success with the implementation of open educational resources (OER) on a campus leverages the expertise of the SUNY campuses that are successfully using OER, and the expertise of the Open SUNY Institutional Readiness process. It provides a framework of assessments, best practices, and technology tools for supporting faculty to locate, adopt, and adapt OER.
Orange Grove
Florida's Orange Grove digital repository provides access to hundreds of open resources for community college, higher education, vocational education, or continuing education.
Open Knowledge Repository
The World Bank is the largest single source of development knowledge. The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.

Librarians

Project CORA: Community of Online Research Assignments
Particularly good for assignments that cover information literacy topics such as evaluation, ethics, etc.

Math

MyOpenMath
MyOpenMath runs on the open source, IMathAS platform, providing free hosted use of this platform in support of free, open textbooks like the ones listed on OpenTextBookStore.com. The intent is to provide classroom use of the platform, without any required cost to students, for schools wanting a managed install of the IMathAS platform, and to provide students self-study opportunities.

Science

InTech
World's largest Science, Technology & Medicine Open Access Book Publisher
HE 250 Personal Health, Portland Community College
This course was created by Valerie Limbrunner-Bartlett, Alissa Leavitt, Shari Rochelle, Rachelle Katter, Michael Meagher, Sasha Grenier, Toni Veeman, Glenn Johnson, and Eldon Lampson, Portland Community College, with grant support from Open Oregon Educational Resources.

Resources

Community College Consortium for OER -
The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) promotes the awareness and adoption of open educational policies, practices, and resources.
NCBI Bookshelf
Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare.
North Carolina Learning Object Repository (NCLOR)
A digital repository that provides one system to house your teaching and learning, research, media and library content. This free resource lets teachers from around NC search the NCLOR, find resources appropriate to the subjects they are teaching, and use them in their classes.
OER World Map
OER World Map shares information on behalf of the worldwide OER community, using local knowledge to describe the OER ecosystem. Built with cutting edge linked open data technology, OER World Map visualizes the world of OER and supports a range of widgets and tools through powerful statistical analysis.
Open Culture
Best Free Cultural and Educational Media on the Internet. Hundreds of free books, movies and courses.
XanEdu -
XanEdu’s solutions are designed for time-challenged educators. We help you tailor course materials to your course, rather than tailoring your course to a traditional text.
Instructors can create a customized textbook with book chapters, case studies and journal articles.