A Guide to Teaching with OER, OA, Open, & Free Materials

"OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University, and it’s our mission to improve student access to education." Emphasis is on titles for classes that (1) are taken by large numbers of students nationwide, and (2) have very expensive textbooks.

Open textbooks developed by SUNY faculty, with diverse titles ranging from nursing care and education through music to corporate social responsibility and discrete mathematics, plus lots more.

"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. he Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network."

This collection of OA textbooks is managed on behalf of the Government of British Columbia to help make education more affordable and accessible.

We publish open content electronic textbooks that are freely available from this website. Book list also includes some links to external textbooks. Subject areas: Business, Computing, Education, Health, Science, and Social Science.

Open-access textbooks in subjects ranging from mathematical analysis, organic chemistry, English language learning, Japanese language, gender and sexualities, and more.

The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access.

"DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals."

The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.

Global open access portal for classic out-of-print titles from the distinguished catalog of Cornell University Press. Offers for the first time open access to key titles in literary criticism and theory, German studies, Slavic studies, etc.

Nearly 900 open-access titles, about half from the humanities publisher De Gruyter and half from their publishing partners.

Gates Open Research is a platform for rapid author-led publication and open peer review of research that has been funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. All articles published on the platform are openly available.

Free ebooks from NASA on topics in aeronautics, science, and NASA-related history.

The Open Research Library (ORL) is planned to include all Open Access book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books. This vital infrastructure is slated to comprise the most comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed Open Access books accessible for everyone.

Searches WorldCat for open access items.

Graduate theses and dissertations published around the world

Thesis and Dissertations from University of California schools

Thesis and Dissertations from Texas School that are members of Texas Digital Library

Open Access theses and dissertations from ProQuest

Developed for the storage and collaboration of datasets on many different topics

Open data platform where people submit dataset

Data from the Federal Government

Data sets from the United Nations

Federal Reserve Economic Data

Tool to search and browse for data repositories in a wide variety of subjects and disciplines.

Spanning disciplines such as Business, Education, Political Science, Social Justice, and more

A repository of learning objects and full courses developed on the Canvas LMS and shared with CC licensing. Reference this video for information on importing a Canvas course into Blackboard, or contact your SHSU Online Instructional Designer.

"This library contains hundreds of free courses, video lectures, and supplemental materials from universities in the United States and China. Many of these lectures are available for download. Please see specific collections or items for licensing information."

OCW makes JHSPH course materials used in the teaching of actual courses freely and openly available on the Web. You may share and adapt the materials on OCW under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

This joint effort of the Department of Education and the Department of Defense acts as an aggregator of information about learning resources available online, including the publisher, location, content area, standards alignment, ratings, reviews, and more.

Often leverages textbook content from sites like OpenStax, but the integration of OER videos, exercises, etc. from other diverse sources adds some unique value to the original texts.
NOTE: Although instructor resources will often require a paid account, the OER textbook content and aligned videos, exercises, and assignments can be accessed for free by you and your students.

"MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community."

"MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity."

"From a single point of access in OER Commons, you can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons' growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER."

"A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs making it easy to access, browse and download." Funded by a Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges (SBCTC) grant.

Free online courses and course materials from Carnegie Mellon

- Online introductory course material from Yale University in a variety of subject areas.
- Terms of use

This page provides details on how to adopt or adapt / remix course materials from Saylor Academy to create or support exactly the course you want.

"The Teaching Commons showcases high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities and makes them available to educators and students around the world. ...includes open-access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, lectures, k-12 materials, and more. Educators and researchers can use the Teaching Commons to discover teaching materials, adopt content for their courses, or create and share their own work."

Search for OER used by institutions of higher education in Texas and across the country, including materials aligned to Texas Core Curriculum requirements. A project of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Learning objects created by, and provided for use by, North Carolina teachers at Pre K through university levels.

"Open Michigan encourages scholars and students to maximize the impact of their work through open sharing...providing a platform for teachers and students to find and re-use high-quality educational materials, and educating scholars about the benefits of sharing their work with the world beyond our campus."

"The Orange Grove repository is Florida's digital repository for instructional resources. The repository provides an environment for educators to search for, use, remix, share, and contribute educational resources. The repository can also be integrated with your Learning Management Systems (e.g. Canvas, Blackboard, Desire 2 Learn)."

Search for preprints of articles in a variety of disciplines

Collection of research by Smithsonian Museums

e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics

Pre-prints in the social and behavioral sciences, education, law, arts and humanities.

Free pre-prints. Community-led digital archive for African research communication.

Seamless access to millions of open access research papers

Scholarly research from Harvard University

Platform for early and open research outputs, from Cambridge University Press

Collection includes paintings, jewelry, sculpture, textiles, pottery, artifacts, mask, clothing, furniture, coins

30,000 public- domain artworks from the CMA’s world-renowned collection of art are released to the public domain for commercial and non-commercial use under CC0 licenses. Tip: Use the Open Access checkbox when searching, and check for the CC0 icons beneath an image to verify its availability.

Over 160,000 images of public-domain art and archives in the Getty collections have been made freely available, without restrictions, to advance the research, teaching, and practice of art and art history. More images are added monthly.

This link specifically shows images from the Met's collection that are free of copyright restrictions. In addition to art, the collection also includes photographs, pottery, albums, baseball cards, jewelry, embroidery, musical instruments. Look for works marked "Public Domain" or "CC0" (Creative Commons Zero). According to the museum website, "you are welcome to use images identified by a CC0 icon for any purpose, including commercial and noncommercial use, free of charge and without requiring permission from the Museum."

From website: NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images.

From the Announcement:
As a pilot, 159 highlights from our collections are available for free download. The art works are also featured in the Google Art Project.

The Paris Musées recently released more than 100,000 works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the works into the public domain.

Thousands of high-quality images of artworks from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, available to download, modify, and use copyright-free.

"Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo."

Collections of art, sculpture,metalwork, photographs, and textiles

"All photos published on Unsplash are licensed under Creative Commons Zero which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash."

Free high-resolution photographs, free of copyright restrictions.