Finding OER

Revised OER resource list for Summer and Fall 2022

As you can see below, there are many sources for OER material. Right now, these are some of the best, so start here if you are beginning your quest to save students money and take control of your curriculum!

See below for more tips and sites:

Before starting

There are a lot of places to find open educational resources! Scroll down to find De Anza's own curated list, or first check out the following:

In order to begin searching for Open Educational Resources on this page, click on the resource type below to find links:

Textbooks

The Open Textbook movement focuses on the creation of books that are built specifically for use as free or low-cost options for education.  Many of the collections will have links to the same books, but each repository has a particular focus and items you can't find in other collections.

  • Cool4Ed California Open Online Library for Education (http://www.cool4ed.org/) includes peer-reviewed open textbooks for the 50 most enrolled courses across CCC, CSU, and UC. Use this list to find faculty in disciplines mentioned in these 50 courses.
  • The Open Textbook Library (https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/) has a searchable, collection of more than 375 open textbooks. Books in the OTL have been peer-reviewed for quality, and the Open Textbook Library has multiple criteria for inclusion in the Library.
  • OpenStax (https://openstax.org/) offers college-level, peer-reviewed textbooks in math/statistics, science, sociology, psychology, economics and history. These books include peer review, editorial support and creation of ancillary content. Available in multiple formats (online, PDF, print on demand), these books are licensed to be revised and remixed by faculty who want to create a custom solution for a course. Here are two OpenStax books created by our very own:
    • Introductory Statistics - Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean
    • Astronomy - Andrew Fraknoi
  • College Open Textbooks Collaborative (http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/) has more than 100 peer-reviewed and open textbooks for use in community college courses. Open textbooks are freely available for use without restriction and can be downloaded or printed from web sites and repositories. 
  • BC Campus OpenEd (open.bccampus.ca/find-open-textbooks) includes texts written specifically for the BC OpenTextbook initiative, as well as books from other sources.
  • Saylor Academy OpenTextbooks (https://www.saylor.org/books/) has more than 100 open textbooks. This collection includes books written specifically for Saylor.org as well as the original editions of the FlatWorldKnowledge textbooks (subsequent editions are only offered for purchase). You can view all their resources by subject area in their library
  • The Directory of OpenAccess Books (http://www.doabooks.org/doab) is a clearinghouse of links to books hosted in various locations, and includes a large selection of international textbooks.
  • Wikibooks (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page) has more than 2,900 books in its open textbook collection.
  • Open Access Publishing in European Networks (http://www.oapen.org/home) library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN has books in multiple languages, covering a large variety of topics. There is a range of licensing for the books, but each book is clearly marked with the license.
  • The Global Text Project (http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/) publishes open-content electronic textbooks that are freely available from this website.
  • Open SUNY Textbooks (https://textbooks.opensuny.org/) currently offers 20 titles.
  • Open Culture (http://www.openculture.com/free_textbooks) has a collection of 150 free textbooks from Art History to Physics and Business. These have various copyrights; please check for open access.
  • InTech (https://www.intechopen.com/) is the publisher of the world's largest collection of open access books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine. 

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Open Education Resource Collections

Open Educational Resource repositories are multi-disciplinary collections of open materials covering all of the educational spectrum. The first few listed are some of the most thorough (as of November 2020.)

  • https://www.valleycollege.edu/open-education-resources/faculty/oer_by_subject.php - Very comprehensive list of resources, sorted by department/subject.
  • http://www.skylinecollege.edu/ztc/oerresources-1.php/ - Another very comprehensive list of resources, sorted by department/subject.
  • OER Commons (https://www.oercommons.org/) is a single search source that can be browsed by grade level, subject area and material type. It pulls from multiple OER collections, including MERLOT and Connexions and is a great first step in an OER search.
  • The Big List from the Univeristy of PIttsburgh (https://pitt.libguides.com/openeducation/biglist) - It's just what it calls itself: A Big list of OER resources, nicely indexed on a single page. 

  • MERLOT Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (https://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm) is a free and open peer-reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials. along with faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community. MERLOT was opened in 1997 and is supported by the California State University System.
  • Academic Senate of CA CC’s OER resources (https://asccc.org/directory/open-educational-resources-initiative-oeri) - Quite a large list of resources, including curated sources described in videos. View as webinars or ppt files, or go straight to the source.
  • OpenStax CNX (formerly Connexions) (cnx.org)  includes lectures, assignments and written educational materials. Content can be created in the Connexions interface and housed within the Connections servers. Users can create collections of existing content and create their own content pages to share. 
  • Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (https://www.oerconsortium.org/) contains discipline-specific links to repositories, textbooks and other teaching resources. It offers a community of faculty interested in OER and OER-related training workshops and seminars.
  • Open Course Library (http://www.openwa.org/open-course-library/) houses a collection of course materials for 81 of the most heavily enrolled community college courses in the state of Washington.
  • OpenOregon (http://openoregon.org/) allows you to search by discipline, course or institution and lists OER courses and books used by CC faculty in Oregon. 
  • The Teaching Commons (http://teachingcommons.us/) has OER from leading colleges and universities curated by librarians and their institutions.
  • Orange Grove (http://florida.theorangegrove.org/og/access/home.do) is an online library of openly available instructional resources for Florida's educators. 
  • Lumen Learning (https://courses.lumenlearning.com/catalog/lumen) provides open courses in a variety of high-demand subjects and disciplines. These courses are collections of high-quality OER, not necessarily as a traditional textbook. You can use them as-is or modify them to fit your instructional style and students’ needs.
  • Curriki (http://www.curriki.org/) is a hub for free, open course materials. Find thousands of course materials in a variety of subjects and grade levels, including free courses and textbooks.
  • Temoa (http://www.temoa.info/) is a multilingual catalog of OER. 

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Subject Specific

  • De Anza Bookstore (http://books.deanza.edu/SiteText.aspx?id=30729) is a curated list of courses at De Anza College that use OER.
  • San Jose State University (http://libguides.sjsu.edu/openresources) has curated a discipline specific OER list
  • OER LibGuide from the University of Oklahoma Libraries (http://guides.ou.edu/OER/oer/discipline_specific_oers) provides resources for looking for OER by subject.
  • The American Institute of Mathematics (https://aimath.org/textbooks/)  provides open math books that have been judged to meet the evaluation criteria set by the AIM editorial board.
  • Noba (http://nobaproject.com/) focuses on free textbooks in Psychology. Instructor manuals, PowerPoint presentations, and test banks available.
  • The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) (https://www.cali.org/) provides more than 50 books on legal topics.
  • Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page) contains digitized and archived cultural works from the public domain, making it a rich source for those in the Humanities.
  • ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/jrnlallbooks/all/open-access) is a leading full-text scientific database offering journal articles and book chapters from more than 2,500 journals and almost 20,000 books.
  • Smarthistory (Smarthistory.org) is a free, multimedia web-book and is organized by artist, theme or time period.

  • The American Yawp (http://www.americanyawp.com/) is a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook.
  • FLOSS Manuals (https://en.flossmanuals.net/) is a collection of manuals about free and open source software. 

  • FreeTechBooks (http://www.freetechbooks.com/) is a resource which lists out computer science and programming books which are made freely & legally available on the Internet.

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Images and Video

Some search sites and techniques to help you find openly licensed images and video. Check out the following guide to finding these invaluable resources:

Always double-check the terms of use and rights information. Some sites mix public-domain and free images with copyrighted images. A work is in the public domain if it's no longer under copyright protection. Public-domain works can be used freely without permission. If a copyrighted image has a Creative Commons license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/), it may be freely used under certain conditions.

The Creative Commons Search (https://search.creativecommons.org/) is a great tool for searching for images you can use, remix, and share. You can search across a number of sites, including

  • Flickr Commons (https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/) for public photo archives from around the world - GIGANTIC amount of photos and video, FREE to use! You can even search by color.
  • Smithsonian Open Access (https://www.si.edu/openaccess) - Huge repository of millions of free images from The Smithsonian Institute. Fun to simply browse...a definite time sucker!
  • Google Images (https://images.google.com/) to find images that are free to use, share, or modify, go to Tools,  then narrow your search by usage rights.
  • Pexels (https://www.pexels.com/about/) - Newer, community-oriented high quality photos and videos, free for use.
  • Open Clip Art (https://openclipart.org/)
  • Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/)
  • Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) 
  • British Library on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/) has over 1 million copyright-free images from books published in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Content from University of Oklahoma Libraries under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

OER Canvas shells

The Online Education Initiative has put together multiple course shells in Canvas using OpenStax. These courses align with the OEI rubric (sound design and fully accessible) and have already been set up in Modules using OpenStax content. Faculty can import the content into their own course shell and then add elements for substantive interaction and additional assignments/assessments.
 
To explore the content of these courses:
  1. Log into Canvas and then click the "Start a New Course" button (lower right side of your window)
  2. Name the course (for example, "OpenStax Astronomy") and save.
  3. Click on the Commons icon (left side of your screen below your Canvas Inbox).
  4. Search for OEI OER OpenStax.
  5. Click on the course you're interested in exploring.
  6. On the right side of your window, you'll see an "Import into Canvas" area. Check the box next to the OpenStax course you created in step 2, then click Import into Course.
  7. The import process can take up to 30 minutes, but is typically complete in about 5 minutes. Click back on Dashboard and then on your OpenStax course to explore the content.
The Online Education Center is available to help faculty incorporate this content with their own course material. Faculty can attend an Open Lab (dates available in the Canvas Calendar) or email onlineeducation@deanza.edu to set up an appointment.

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In this ever-evolving trend, this is not a complete list, so it will be periodically updated. 

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