Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

It is vital to have access to free education so below we created a list of nine websites where you can access these free resources.

When educational resources are digital and openly licensed under Creative Commons licenses, they can be shared with everyone for the marginal cost of $0. Textbooks, courses, and lesson plans become free and easy to find, share, customize, and combine. Thanks to CC licenses, learners can find and incorporate free materials for reports and presentations, educators can customize textbooks and lesson plans, universities can distribute video lectures to a global audience, and publishers can adapt materials and develop services for an enhanced learning experience.

Recorded Lectures & Video Tutorials Search

Many institutions have recorded on-campus lectures and published them as OER licensed with Creative Commons. Short video tutorials on a particular subject are also available. Searching for recorded lectures or video tutorials? Try:

1. Open Yale Courses

Open Yale Courses (OYC) provide lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses licensed using Creative Commons. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences. Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.

2. MIT

MIT has their own MIT YouTube channel where recorded lectures are uploaded. MIT is also well known for the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, a Creative Commons licensed web-based publication of virtually all MIT on campus course content online including lecture notes, exams, and videos. Courses with substantial video and/or audio components are listed here.

3. UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley’s webcast.berkeley is a central service for online video and audio lectures. From the home page you can search for a particular course or simply choose to view all courses. Video and audio lectures are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) and made available through YouTube and/or iTunes.

4. Khan Academy

The Khan Academy has a large library of videos covering math, biology, chemistry, physics and even the humanities, finance and history. Khan videos aren’t so much recorded lectures as short 10 minute long tutorials with an instructor narrating explanations and working things out on a board by hand on your computer screen. Check out Khan’s library of videos.

Open Textbook Search

Searching for open textbooks? Try:

5. College Open Textbooks



The Community College Open Textbooks Collaborative, funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that support for authors opening their resources, and other services. As part of their service they provide a listing of Open Textbooks by Subject.

6.Open Stax College

OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. OpenStax free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of courses. See the free, open, high quality textbooks they provide here.

7. Siyavula

Siyavula supports and encourages communities of teachers to work together, openly share their teaching resources and benefit from the use of technology. Siyavula has created a series of open textbooks for math and science Grades 10-12. They have also developed an online practice service, modelled on exam questions, which allows learners to practise math and science questions they may find in their tests and exams. This practice service is well integrated with the Siyavula textbooks and these resources work together to ensure learners excel in Mathematics and Physical Sciences. Learners are able to practise using their mobile phones or computers.

8. CK-12

CK-12 offers free high-quality, standards-aligned, open content in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) subjects. By providing these free resources, CK-12 is working toward educational equity for all. CK-12 provides an integrated set of tools for learning including digital textbooks, concept-based learning, SAT prep, and interactive Algebra curriculum (with additional math and science subjects in progress). CK-12 resources are openly licensed using Creative Commons.

9. Boundless

Boundless is offering services that use OER to create a free replacement to a student’s assigned textbook that covers the same key concepts more efficiently. Boundless is currently focused on AP High School and Introductory level College courses in the following 8 subjects: American History, Anatomy and Physiology, Biology, Business, Economics, Psychology, Sociology, and Writing. They are planning to expand into more subjects.