This list includes many resources available to search for and browse OER This list will be primarily useful to instructors engaged in introductory and deep searches for OER to support teaching and learning.
Beginning your search
Here are some good places to begin searching for open educational resources:
- Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota)
“These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.” - OASIS search tool by SUNY Geneseo
“Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 61 different sources and contains 160,717 records. OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo’s Milne Library in consultation with Alexis Clifton, SUNY OER Services Executive Director.” - OER Commons
OER Commons “offers a comprehensive infrastructure for curriculum experts and instructors at all levels to identify high-quality OER and collaborate around their adaptation, evaluation, and use to address the needs of teachers and learners.” - MERLOT
“Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues. Be recognized for your contributions to quality education.”
Search Tools
- Search: Mason OER Metafinder
The Mason OER Metafinder searches: American Memory Project (Library of Congress), AMSER (Applied Math and Science Education Repository), BC Campus Textbooks, Digital Public Library of America, Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), HathiTrust (Full View Available), MERLOT II, MIT OpenCourseware, OAOpen.org, OER Commons, OER at Internet Archive, Open Textbook Library, OpenStax CNX, Project Gutenberg, World Digital Library. - OASIS search tool by SUNY Geneseo
- Creative Commons Search Tool
This tool is helpful when searching for a variety of media (music, video, images, etc.), but do make sure your results are openly licensed before using or remixing.
Repositories with a variety of materials
- OER Commons
OER Commons “offers a comprehensive infrastructure for curriculum experts and instructors at all levels to identify high-quality OER and collaborate around their adaptation, evaluation, and use to address the needs of teachers and learners.” - MERLOT
“Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues. Be recognized for your contributions to quality education.” - Teaching Commons
“The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.” - AMSER (Applied Math & Science Education Repository)
“AMSER is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.” - OpenStax CNX Library
“[A] place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.” - World Digital Library
“The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials” from countries and cultures from around the world. - CORE: Open Access for the Humanities
“A nonprofit, interdisciplinary, broad-ranging alternative to commercial networks” and hub of Humanities resources
Textbooks, Curricula, etc.
- Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota)
“These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.” - Pressbooks Directory
- BCcampus Open Textbooks
An initiative from BCcampus, which “is a publicly funded organization that uses information technology to connect the expertise, programs, and resources of all British Columbia post-secondary institutions.” - Milne Open Textbooks
Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff. - Affordable Learning Georgia
“Affordable Learning Georgia is funding and supporting efforts to replace commercial learning materials with no-cost-to-student alternatives, with a focus on the most-enrolled University of System Georgia undergraduate courses, especially those in the Core Curriculum.” - Bay College OER
A guide to OER textbooks and courses at Bay College, a community college in Michigan. - BookBoon
“Bookboon.com has published more than 1,000 free textbooks for students. These textbooks can be downloaded in PDF format without prior registration.” - College Open Textbooks Collaborative
“The College Open Textbooks Collaborative, a collection of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges. 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.” - Open Access and Free Books on MUSE
“Project MUSE offers over 500 fully open access (OA) books from several distinguished university presses. The books are provided through the permission of their publishers and are freely available to libraries and users around the world.” - Open Textbooks from MIT
An index to the online textbooks in MIT OpenCourseWare. - The Orange Grove – Open Textbooks
Florida’s OER repository. “This collection offers open books and textbooks from many sources.” - Textbook Archive
[T]his is the archive of a small project by Andy Schmitz to archive Creative Commons-licensed copies of all the books which were available online from a specific publisher at the end of 2012. (That publisher has asked to remain unnamed here. . . )” - DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books
Directory of over 10,000 open access books across disciplines and subjects, many of them highly technical. Ability to browse and search by title, subject, and publisher. Books available in many languages. - Zero-Cost Alternatives to Commercial Materials (Cal State University)
Input the ISBN of the commercial book you seek to replace with free online course materials.
Open Courses
- Lumen Learning
“Lumen Learning publishes open courses to make it easier for faculty members to adopt and teach with open educational resources (OER). And to make education more affordable for thousands of students every year.” - MIT Open Courseware
“MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.” - Open Course Library
“The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts.” Managed by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. - Open Learning Initiative (OLI) – Carnegie Mellon University
“The Open Learning Initiative offers online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. Our aim is to combine open, high-quality courses, continuous feedback, and research to improve learning and transform higher education.” - Open Yale Courses
“Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.” - Saylor Academy
Collection of nearly 100 free and open online courses at college and professional levels. - Academic Earth
“Collection of free online courses from the world’s top universities” with videos.
Video
Please note that while some repositories listed below contain public domain or Creative Commons-licensed videos, many include videos that are freely-accessible but not issued with an open license.
- National Screening Room
“A digital collection from the Library of Congress. The films range from early silent shorts from the Library’s Paper Print Collection to newsreels and actualities, from home movies to educational and sponsored films, from television to feature films, and much more. Many of the films in the collection are public domain and are fully downloadable, while others still under copyright are available to stream only.” - Big Think
“Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.” - CosmoLearning
“CosmoLearning (CL) is an educational website committed to improving the quality of homeschooling, teaching and student excellence. Designed for educators and self-learners, organized according to traditional curriculum standards, CosmoLearning provides courses, video lectures, documentaries, images, books and other multimedia in dozens of subjects.” - Critical Commons
“A public media archive and fair use advocacy network that supports the transformative reuse of media in scholarly and creative contexts.” Users post video clips, often with written commentary. - Films For Action
“Our goal is to provide citizens of the world with the information and perspectives essential to creating a more just, sustainable, and democratic society. Here you’ll find over 4,000 of the best documentaries, short films and videos that you can watch free online. And, since there’s still so much to learn about that isn’t featured in a film, you will also find hundreds of articles here, too.” - Internet Archive – Video
“Moving Images library of free movies, films, and videos. This library contains over a million digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download.” - Khan Academy
“Our library of videos covers K-12 math, science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and even reaches into the humanities with playlists on finance and history. Each video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long, and especially purposed for viewing on the computer.” - Library of Congress Webcasts
Webcasts on a variety of topics across disciplines, along with links to LOC Webcasts Youtube page. - Medical Animation Library
A list of freely-accessible hubs of surgical/medical videos. - Medline Plus Anatomy Videos
“These animated videos show the anatomy of body parts and organ systems and how diseases and conditions affect them.” - MIT Video
“The MIT Video website — developed and maintained by the MIT News Office — aggregates and curates video produced by the Institute’s offices, laboratories, centers and administration. This includes feature and editorial videos, event recordings, academic content and more.” - Research Channel (on YouTube)
“ResearchChannel is a nonprofit media and technology organization that connects a global audience with the research and academic institutions whose developments, insights and discoveries affect our lives and futures.” - TED
“TED includes the award-winning TED Talks video site, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize.” - U.S. National Archives (on YouTube)
YouTube channel for U.S. National Archives with videos - VideoLectures.NET (STEM oriented)
A “free and open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science.” - Vimeo
Platform to host and watch videos. Not all videos on Vimeo are freely accessible. - World Lecture Project
“”(wlp)° is the central platform for delivering academic videos from faculties worldwide. You can find videos according to various criteria: theme, faculty, country, language, institution and others. We do not only collect and embed videos provided by huge video-platforms like youtube, vimeo, Dailymotion, but we also link to videos on university-websites and other institutions from everywhere.” - YouTube Teachers
“YouTube.com/Teachers was created to help teachers leverage video to educate, engage and inspire their students. Here you will find tips and tricks for bringing YouTube into the classroom, as well as over 400 video playlists curated by CUE and aligned with the Common Core.”
Photos & Images
See special instructions for finding Creative Commons-licensed photos and images, specifically.
- Flickr Advanced Search – Creative Commons
On the left side of the advanced search options, select “All Creative Commons” from the license pull down menu. - Google Advanced Image Search
After entering search terms and getting a list of results, click on “Tools” in the menu above the results. Then click on “Usage rights” and choose “Creative Commons licenses” from the drop-down menu. This searches Flickr Creative Commons licensed photos, Wikimedia, and other sites. - The Gender Spectrum Collection: Stock Photos Beyond the Binary
From Broadly, “The Gender Spectrum Collection is a stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés. This collection aims to help media better represent members of these communities as people not necessarily defined by their gender identities—people with careers, relationships, talents, passions, and home lives.” Images licensed under CC BY-NC-ND. - Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Enter keywords in the “Search the Collection” box. On the results page, put a checkmark in the box for “Show public domain images only” to see images that are freely available to use (under public domain). For more information on using this site, see the LACMA blog Unframed. - The Met’s Open Images
As part of the Met’s Open Access policy, you can freely copy, modify and distribute any image marked as OA, even for commercial purposes. Enter keywords in the “Search the Collection” box. On the results page, put a checkmark in the box for “Open Access” to see images that are freely available to use. - National Gallery of Art Open Access Images
“The National Gallery of Art has an open access policy for images of works of art in our permanent collection which the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are available for download free of charge for any use, whether commercial or non-commercial. Open Access image downloads are now available directly from the object pages located on this website.” - National Park Service Digital Images Archive
Public domain photos from the National Park Service. “Multimedia credited to NPS without any copyright symbol are public domain. Multimedia credited with a copyright symbol (indicating that the creator may maintain rights to the work) or credited to any entity other than NPS must not be presumed to be public domain; contact the host park or program to ascertain who owns the material.” - NOAA Photo Library
“The NOAA Photo Library has been built so as to capture the work, observations, and studies that are carried on by the scientists, engineers, commissioned officers, and administrative personnel that make up this complex and scientifically diverse agency. Images in the NOAA Photo Library are in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted. There is no fee for downloading any images on the site.” - The Noun Project
“Over a million curated icons, created by a global community.” Icons are available for free download under a CC-BY license. The Noun Project also offers subscriptions in which users may pay to download and use icons without attribution. Login needed to download. - Pexels
Repository of stock photos with information on licensing and attribution. - Pics4Learning
“Pics4Learning is a safe, free image library for schools. Teachers and students can use the copyright-friendly photos and images for classrooms, multimedia projects, web sites, videos, portfolios, or any other project in an educational setting. Photographers from around the world donate images to this collection. While the photographers retain the rights to these photos, they have graciously allowed their use through this collection.” - PIXNIO
A repository of public domain images. All images are free to use under the Pixnio license. - Smithsonian Collections Search Center
“An online catalog containing most of Smithsonian major collections from our museums, archives, libraries, and research units.” Use the search options pull-down menu next to the search box to select “Only return results with CC0 media” for public domain images. - Wikimedia Commons
Search box is in upper right. On results page scroll down for media (photos, etc.). Includes photos and more that are no-cost, under public domain, Creative Commons and other licenses.
Music
- ccMixter
“ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.” - BBC Sound Effects Library
“16,000 BBC Sound Effects made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for use under the terms of the RemArc Licence. The Sound Effects are BBC copyright, but they may be used for personal, educational or research purposes, as detailed in the license.” - Danosongs.com Royalty-free Music
Royalty music from the musician Dan-O. Free for download and use in media - Free Music Archive (FMA)
“The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads directed by WFMU […] Every MP3 you discover on The Free Music Archive is pre-cleared for certain types of uses that would otherwise be prohibited by copyright laws that were not designed for the digital era. These uses vary and are determined by the rights-holders themselves. - Freesound
“Freesound aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse.” - Internet Archive – Audio & MP3 Library
“This library contains over two hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Many of these audios and MP3s are available for free download.”
