Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: Find

Finding OER

If you're interested in incorporating OER into your course, one of the first steps is to identify what materials are available to you. On this page, you'll find a number of OER repositories and some other OER guides from other institutions that can lead you to additional resources.

Here are some basic tips for locating OERs:

Investigate different repositories. Each one contains a different collection of books and subject areas.
Contact your subject librarian to ask for repository recommendations.
Not all OER are textbooks. These repositories also contain activities, syllabi, lesson plans, labs, videos, and more.
Be mindful of licenses. Although most resources found in these repositories are going to be totally open, some may have more restrictive CC licenses that prevent derivative works or different licenses.

OER Repositories

You can search the resources below to locate potential OERs for use in your courses. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list:

American Institute of Mathematics
British Columbia Campus OpenEd
A directory of open textbooks created and reviewed by British Columbia post-secondary faculty. Includes textbooks on a wide variety of subjects and focused on highly enrolled first and second year post-secondary courses.
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI)
A collection of open textbooks for law courses.
Directory of Open Access Books
Listings of open access books from a variety of publishers. Includes books that are more focused than general textbooks found from other sources.
Grand Valley State University
A collection of open textbooks by Grand Valley State University Faculty.
MERLOT Textbooks
Textbook section of the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT). Links to textbooks from other sites.
OER Commons
A directory for finding open educational resources. Includes materials from many other sites listed on this page.
OpenStax
A collection of dozens of high quality open textbooks that have been written and peer reviewed by college and university faculty.
Open Textbook Library
This resource helps users locate and select open textbooks on a wide variety of subjects. Includes reviews from faculty members at various colleges and universities.
The WAC Clearinghouse
Resources, including a collection of open texts, focused on Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC).
Wikibooks
A site for collaboratively written open books.
Open RN
Open Nursing Textbooks with accompanying virtual reality scenarios and videos.

Colorado OER Libguides

Other university libraries in Colorado have created guides like this one to help their faculty find and create OERs. You may find suggestions of additional OER repositories (beyond the list above) in their guides:

Kraemer Family Library

Open Educational Resources

Finding OER

OER Repositories

Colorado OER Libguides