Where to find Open Education Resources, Tools, and Support
Finding appropriate OER, be it course modules, lesson plans, textbooks, or teaching tools, can be difficult given how widely it's dispersed across the web. This catalogue compiles some of the sources or collections we've found in our searches that we think are good starting points for you. Where applicable, we've indicated the kind of content you're likely to find in each location, as well as the faculty or faculties that are most likely to be served there.
The B.C. Open Collection includes course packs and open textbooks released or curated by BCampus.
OERs are available particularly in the form of open textbooks. Covers a multitude of subjects, including art and design, engineering, social sciences, math and statistics. Books give information on the original source, such as author and institution, and if the textbook is linked out, such as those available on OpenStax.
To learn more about the functionality of the new collection site, read the blog post Creating a Better User Experience for the B.C. Open Collection.
Available at: Chemistry for Engineers.
This course is designed to provide engineering students with a fundamental knowledge of physical chemistry and to demonstrate the relevance of that knowledge to the practise of a variety of engineering disciplines. Some of the topics are: states of matter, equilibrium in non-reactive systems, and equilibrium in electrochemical systems.
Available at: Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources.
With members from colleges from North America, CCCOER share best practices and resources to promote OERs. Contains links to access OER repositories, open textbooks, courseware, journals, and digital media.
Available at: CACHE teaching resources.
These resources include syllabi, schedules, computer-aided tools, interactive simulations, screencasts, concept questions, textbook information, useful links, and in some cases, complete course notes.
Available at: eCampusOntario Open Library.
eCampusOntario offers open courses and textbooks in a variety of disciplines.
Available at: EOL – Encyclopedia of Life.
Hosted by the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian), EOL aim to create a global open resource about life on earth. It partners with other museums, libraries, universities, research centres, etc. to build and share information, such as datasets, tools, and other content. While lesson plans go up to grade 12, other content may be suitable, from podcasts, biodiversity cards, google earth tours, biodiversity articles, and a biodiversity, observational platform.
Available at: InTech Open Books.
Open access books published in a variety of disciplines with a focus on physical sciences, engineering, and technology. Focused on books broadly, so the content may not be structured to suit 1:1 textbook replacement.
Available at: JHSPH OpenCourseWare.
Offers over 90 courses from the John Hopkins University (Bloomberg School of Public Health), complete with lectures and course material. License allows for free and open use, reuse, adaptation and redistribution of material, provided the source (JHSPH) is attributed and material is shared alike.
Available at: LearnChemE.
Developed by the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Boulder, this OER contains hundreds of interactive simulations, interactive self-study modules, and videos on the topic of chemical and biological engineering.
Available at: LibreTexts.
LibreTexts hosts open courses and textbooks developed by a number of institutions. LibreTexts is an organization that was initiated by the University of California, Davis, and has since received support from the U.S. Government, as well as from a number of universities across the U.S. In particular, LibreTexts Engineering and Chemistry have been highlighted as containing particularly good resources.
Available at: masonOER Metafinder.
Mason OER Metafinder is a federated search tool and searches several OER repositories simultaneously, including BC Campus, College Open Textbooks, HathiTrust, JSTOR Open books, Merlot, MIT Open Courseware, NYPL Digital Collections, OER Commons, Project Gutenburg. Search by OER specific sites.
Available at: MERLOT.
The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
Available at: MITOpenCourseware.
Contains several open courses (with course materials) for undergraduate and graduate students. Information given includes a summary of the course, instructor(s), academic level, and features (ie. lecture notes, assignments, exams, etc.). Subject areas include business, energy, engineering, fine arts, health & medicine, humanities, mathematics, science, social science, society, and teaching & education.
Available at: National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
As described on the NSDL website, "The National Science Digital Library provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines—both formal and informal, institutional and individual, in local, state, national, and international educational settings. The NSDL collection contains structured descriptive information (metadata) about web-based educational resources held on other sites by their providers. These providers have contribute this metadata to NSDL for organized search and open access to educational resources via this website and its services.
Most resources in the library adhere to principles of Open Educational Resource (OER) access, although some resources are restricted to provider site membership, or may have a cost associated with them (indicated in the full record of the resource)."
Available at: NCBI Bookshelf.
Bookshelf by the National Centre for Biotechnology Information with free online books and documents in life science and healthcare.
Available at: Oasis.
OASIS (Openly available sources integrated search) is a search tool for OERs that searches open content from 98 sources and contains over 350,000 records. It is developed by SUNY Geneseo’s Milne Library. Results may be filtered by object type, subject, source, and CC license.
This is a list of OERs that librarians at University of Ottawa have suggested for uOttawa academic departments and specific courses.
Available at: OER Commons.
This is for those who are just starting out with OERs. OER Commons is easy to use, contains newer content, and results can be filtered by material type. OER Commons contains “Open Author” which helps creators build OERs and publish them. Formats include media rich documents, lesson builders and module builders. It can also build microsites for organizations to index their own unique content library.
Available at: OER World Map.
World map of OERs, where their home institution and paragraph of the site, repository, or program. Search by institution, OER-type, person, publication, or project.
Available at: OERu.
OERu, coordinated by the OER Foundation, is an independent Australian not-for-profit network that offers free online courses for students. Courses are developed by recognized universities and colleges and designed for formal academic credit. Several international organizations are partners, including ecampus Ontario, Ryerson, Penn State, and Athabasca University. Offers micro-open online courses which takes 2-3 weeks and is a small portion of a larger full course.
Available at: Open Textbook Library.
Supported by the Center for Open Education at the University of Minnesota, the Open Textbook Library provides textbooks in a variety of disciplines.
Available at: Open Waterloo.
This site showcases a collection of open online resources for learning and knowledge creation/dissemination at the University of Waterloo. Open resources are freely available to users online, accessible by anyone from anywhere without discrimination and can be found in many formats from text and data, to audio, video and multi-media.
Available at: OpenStax.
Publishes peer-reviewed, open textbooks that are free online. Subjects range from math, business, history, to community created content of music, and programming.
Available at: Open.Ed@PSU.
Created by the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences faculty at Penn State, over 70 courses and course materials are available for use, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute. Topics include GIS, environment, energy, sustainability and more.
Available at: PHET – Interactive Simulations for Science and Math.
Gamified and interactive math and science simulations to engage students. Includes accessible sims made to work with assistive technology. Grade levels range from elementary to university-level programs.
Available at: Pressbooks Directory.
Pressbooks Directory is a free, searchable catalog that includes 6,465 open access books published by 174 organizations and networks using Pressbooks. It's easy to copy, revise, remix, and redistribute any openly licensed content found here using Pressbooks' publishing platform. Nearly all books are highly accessible, and many include interactive H5P learning activities to engage learners.
Available at: Project Jupyter.
Project Jupyter is a non-profit, open-source, open-standards project that supports interactive data science and scientific computing across all programming languages. The Notebook interface is a web-based interactive development environment which can access and work with live data as it is being run.
Available at: SOFA – Simulation Open Framework Architecture.
SOFA is an open-source framework dedicated to research, prototyping and developing physics-based simulations, with an emphasis on medical simulations.
Available at: SOL*R.
Description from the SOL*R website, "SOL*R is a repository service provided by BCcampus that allows educators to access FREE online learning resources. It facilitates sharing, discovery, reuse, and remixing of a growing collection of content created by BC post-secondary educators.
SOL*R includes learning resources from a wide variety of disciplines and subject areas. Resources range from open textbooks, individual learning activities and tools, all the way to full programs."
Available at: TED talks.
Filter video recommendations based on topics, languages, and duration of video. Details provides information may also contain information on presenter, and affiliated school for the video.
Available at: University of Oxford Podcasts.
Oxford’s Open Content allows for reuse, remixing and redistribution for education. Hundreds of courses are presented in the form of podcasts and include the instructor’s name, episode title, description of content, and date of recording. Content is browsable by series title, speaker, or departments and colleges.