Where to find Open Education Resources, Tools, and Support: textbooks

Available at: eCampusOntario Open Library. 

eCampusOntario offers open courses and textbooks in a variety of disciplines. 

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: 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: 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.

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: 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: 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: 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: 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."