Library Research Guides: Open Educational Resources (OER): OER for Faculty

What is it and why is this important?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes.

What is an 'open license' and how does it differ from copyright and things in the 'Public Domain?'

Boyoung Chae [CC BY 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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Finding OER

OER includes:

Full courses
Course materials
Modules
Textbooks
Streaming videos
Tests
Software
Any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge

OER does NOT include:

All links found on the internet - UNLESS they display a CC license; state that they are public domain; or you have requested, and been given, explicit permission to use the resources.

Here are some locations for finding OER resources:

Open Educational Resources by Discipline
From the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges: Open Educational Resources Initiative, this current list of curated OER resources is sorted by discipline.
COOL4Ed
Collaboration between the UC, CSU and California Community College System. The three State of California Higher Education Systems are working together to provide you easy access to quality FREE and OPEN eTextbooks that everyone and anyone can use for teaching and learning
LibreTexts: Free the Textbook
The LibreText Project is a leading, non-commercial open textbook organization initiated at the University of California, Davis, and many other higher education institutions, including a wide variety from California, including CSUs, private universities, and several community colleges.
OpenStax
OpenStax is a nonprofit educational technology initiative based at Rice University. Since 2012, OpenStax has created peer-reviewed, openly-licensed textbooks, which are available in free digital formats and for a low cost in print. Most books are also available in Kindle versions on Amazon.com and in the iBooks Store.
MERLOT
Administered by the CSU System, Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) houses tens of thousands of learning objects and tools for building your own resources. The collection includes books, quizzes, exercises, labs, assessments, and more.
Canvas Commons
The Canvas Commons link is located in the global navigation menu on the left side in Canvas (View the Canvas Guide, How do I use Commons). You must have a Teacher, Teaching Assistant or Course Designer role in at least one Canvas course in order to access Canvas Commons.