LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: OER

What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely available, reusable documents, assessments, courses media, textbooks, and more. They are shared by universities, colleges, individual instructors, and instructional designers to both assist instructors in teaching and to ease the financial burden for resources on students. This guide will provide you with links to find OER and links to create them yourself.

Why should faculty use or develop OERs?

OERs have a number of benefits. They can help with

Student success
Innovation
Cost-cutting
Accessibility
Adaptability

See more in the Why OERs tab

How can the library help with OERs?

The library can assist you in:

Identifying Open Educational Resources that are reliable and appropriate for your course
Determining the copyright or licensing status of materials you wish to use
Identifying resources for creating your own OER
Finding Creative Commons and Open Access images for your own OER
Identifying platforms to host your OER

For assistance with OERs, contact the Gumberg Library or Melody Diehl Detar, Instructional Design Librarian.

Links to OER collections

MERLOT
Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching

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From the site: "MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community."
OER Commons
A database of resources that can be filtered by educational level
Applied Math and Science Education Repository
More than math and science
HippoCampus
Educational resources that includes some college-level content
Connexions
Rice's collection of modules, books, and other course content
Blended Learning Toolkit
From the site: "The Blended Learning Toolkit is a free, open repository of information, resources, models, and research related to blended learning."

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From the site: "The Blended Learning Toolkit is a free, open repository of information, resources, models, and research related to blended learning. Funded by a Next Generation Learning Challenge Wave 1 grant, the Toolkit is a collaboration between the University of Central Florida and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities."

Links to OER textbooks

Other Guides to OERs

TRU Open Education Resources (OERs) Primer - an introduction to the purpose and use of OER, from Thompson Rivers University

Open Educational Resources - A guide to OER, from the Austin Community College District

Links to OER courses

iTunesU
Duquesne has its own iTunes channel
MITOpenCourseware
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From the site: "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."
MITx
From the site: "MITx is designed for the MIT community and runs on Open edX"
The Open University
A large, international, online university based out of the UK
Saylor Academy
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From the site: "Saylor Academy’s mission is to open education to all. This goal is sustained by the continuing growth of a broader open education ecosystem. We are dedicated partners in this movement — creating and curating open educational resources (OER), piloting innovative credentials, and deploying open source technology, all toward supporting learning opportunities for all who seek them."

Links to create OER

80 Tools for OER Authoring
From the Open Education Database
iBooks Author
Allows authors to create dynamic textbooks
OER Commons Authoring
From the site: "Create Open Educational Resources (on your own, or with others) with our publishing tools. Our authoring tools help you build OER, lesson plans, and courses—and then publish them, to the benefit of educators and learners everywhere. "

This guide was originally created by Marcia Rapchak, Ed.D.