Open Educational Resources | Feature

16 OER Sites Every Educator Should Know



Photo: Shutterstock.com

Open educational resources not only save students from triple-digit (or more!) textbook costs, but they also allow instructors to mix-and-match content for a more personalized, engaging learning experience. Here are 16 resources that offer a wide range of content and tools to help implement OER in just about any course.

1) College Open Textbooks

This site lists open textbooks organized by subject area, many of which have been peer reviewed for their suitability at community colleges.

2) Learningpod

Pegged as the "largest library of free, online practice questions in the world, this Kaplan division teamed up with OpenStax to create questions sets specifically for its open textbooks.

3) Lumen Learning

This OER-focused company provides open courses with "zero textbook cost." Their curriculum comes with all the OER students will require.

4) MERLOT II

The California State University System's collection of slightly more than 45,000 resources is rated, peer-reviewed and tallied by how many "personal collections" each resides in. It lists more than 3,000 open textbooks, some of which have accessibility information for students with disabilities.

5) MIT Open Courseware Online Textbooks

MIT's library of online textbooks is one of the few sources for OER on aeronautics, civil engineering and material science, among many other disciplines.

6) OER Commons

This digital hub created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education offers 73,000 kinds of OER, along with tools for creating OER, training on how to use OER and the ability to create OER "Commons" — groups that share resources for a given purpose.

7) Open Course Library

Managed by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, this content is organized by course.

8) Open Education Consortium

The Open Education Consortium is a community of 240-plus schools as well as organizations and people who want to advance the idea of "open education." It features an OER resource toolkit, webinars, in-person events and links to open textbooks.

9) Open Learning Initiative

Carnegie Mellon's (PA) open courses (and associated content) denote a marked emphasis on STEM, including computing.

10) OpenStax CNX

This is Rice University's (TX) "open space," where educators have stashed thousands of learning objects that can be or are already organized into books. It is also the parent of OpenStax College.