LibGuides: Open Access: Finding and Accessing Open Access Resources: Open Educational Resources

What Are Open Educational Resources?

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost, and without needing to ask permission. Unlike copyrighted resources, OER have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights” (OER Commons).

OERs include a wide range of education materials including etextbooks, lecture notes, assessment materials and online courses. OERs are commonly made available under one of the Creative Commons licences, which allow for varying degrees of re-use and adaptation, provided that the original source is acknowledged.

In addition to the Open Access resources such as journal articles, books, theses, etc. which have been described elsewhere in this LibGuide, there are specific platforms that you can use specifically to find Open Educational Resources (OERs).

How Can I Find Open Educational Resources?

OER Commons
A growing collection of Open Educational Resources that you can navigate by subject area, material type or curated collections. It currently contains over 50,000 high-quality Open Educational Resources.
MIT Open Courseware
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of nearly all MIT course content. All OCW materials is openly available.
OpenLearn
OpenLearn is the Open University’s free learning site which includes over 650 courses across a range of disciplines.
Open Yale Courses
Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale courses to the public free of charge. The courses range across disciplines including liberal arts, humanities, social sciences and physical and biological sciences.
Open Washington
Find OER: Open Washinton’s OER site has lists of links to OER courseware, images, text and audio-visual materials. The lists are organised by category to make searching more efficient and effective. You can find the lists in the OER Resource Repository.
TU Delft Opencourseware
OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a free and open digital publication of high quality university-level educational materials. The materials are organised as courses, and include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content. OCW are free and openly licensed.

In addition to the resources included in Open Access Books, there are some platforms you can use specifically to find Open Access textbooks, including:

Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are free to use and distribute and are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely adapted or changed with proper attribution. The Open Textbook Library currently contains over 880 Open textbooks.
Open Stax
Open Stax provides access to peer-reviewed, openly licensed free textbooks across a wide range of disciplines including mathematics, humanities, business and social sciences.

There are a number of different resources you can use to find images which are free to re-use. These include:

Creative Commons Search
Creative Commons search allows you to search content available under a CC licence across different service providers including Flickr, YouTube and Google Images.
Pexels
Pexels is a website that offers images and videos that are free to be downloaded and used. All material is made available under the custom Pexels licence.
Pixabay
Pixabay is a website for sharing photos, illustrations, graphics, film footage and music. All materials is shared under the custom Pixabay licence.
Unsplash
Unsplash is a website that offers images that are free to download and use. All images are made available under the custom Unsplash licence.
Wikimedia Commons
A collection of 78,925,896 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.