LibGuides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Finding Resources

“How can I find OER?” Video by Council of Chief State School Officers, CC BY 4.0. Music by Lahaina by Blue Dot Sessions: CC BY NC 4.0

Creative Commons Licensed Materials

This list is a starting point. These are a few places where you can search for openly licensed textbooks. Some of these repositories contain only textbooks, while others contain other learning materials too.

Find Open Textbooks
A curated collection of open textbooks, many reviewed by British Columbia faculty.
LibreTexts
"Freely available open education resources (OER) that supplant conventional paper-based text books. LibreTexts currently encompass twelve widely used college-level disciplines from chemistry to humanities."
1,000+ Open Textbooks and Learning Resources for All Subjects
Duplicates resources found on other sites, such as the Open Textbook Library, but may lead to some additional open textbooks
Open SUNY Course Quality Review Rubric (OSCQR)
Specifically targets online course design. The rubric can be used formatively with new online faculty to help guide, inform, and influence the design of their new online courses, and, it is non-evaluative.
Open Textbook Library
A catalog of open access textbooks to be reviewed by faculty members, made available by the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development. All textbooks in this catalog are openly licenses, complete, and available in print at very little cost. Some reviews available.

Access some textbooks from Open Textbook Library in the HACC Library catalog here.

OpenStax
OpenStax is an initiative of Rice University. A nonprofit organization, OpenStax provides free college textbooks developed and peer-reviewed by educators.

Community College Consortium for OER
This consortium of over 250 community colleges points toresources that can help faculty get started using open educational resources.
Community of Online Research Assignments (CORA)
Open resource for faculty and librarians about Research Assignments. A research assignment is anything that requires students to engage with information resources in a critical or reflective way. This most often includes finding, retrieving, analyzing and evaluating, using and integrating, or organizing the information in order to produce new knowledge.
Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
MERLOT
Established in 1997 through California State University Center for Distributed Learning, provides access to curated online learning, support and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers. FREE membership requires only adding content to the collection.
OASIS
SUNY Geneseo’s Milne Library recently developed and launched an innovative new search tool that can access 52 different OER sources that contain more than 150,000 items.
OER Commons
This digital hub created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Educationoffers 73,000 kinds of OER, along with tools for creating OER, training on how to use OER and the ability to create OER "Commons" — groups that share resources for a given purpose.
Open Learning Initiative
Complete courses from Carnegie Mellon University
Skills Commons: Career and Technical Showcase
The US Department of Labor's Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program are providing this site containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development.

Creative Commons Education/OER Resources
This provides a variety of OER resources for images, videos, audio and recorded lectures among many others.
Creative Commons Images
Search for free content in the public domain and under Creative Commons licenses.
Digital Public Library of America
What's included: Collection of digital images from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States.
Flikr
Search for images and video with creative commons licenses
Getty Open Content Program
The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required.
HippoCampus
HippoCampus, a project of the Monterey Institute of Technology and Education (MITE), is full of high-quality resources in a variety of subjects. It is aimed at high school and college level users.
Jamendo
Songs by musicians who want to share their music.
JSTOR Open Community Collections
Features freely accessible primary source materials in a wide variety of subjects contributed by libraries, museums, and archives.
Khan Academy
Hundreds of short educational videos covering many subjects; especially strong collections in science and math.
National Gallery of Art Images
More than 51,000 open access digital images up to 4000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.
PhET Science Simulations
These interactive tools from the University of Colorado at Boulder are mostly CC licensed.
Skills Commons: Virtual Labs
Free and low-cost multimedia course materials in STEM that engage students through active participation.
Smithsonian Open Access
You can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from their collections.
TED
Inspiring thinkers on a range of subjects present big ideas and lectures on a regular basis- completely CC licensed.
Wikimedia Commons
The thinkers behind Wikipedia bring you images, video and music all openly licensed or in the public domain.

Allgo
Allgo provides diverse images of plus-size individuals.
Disabled and Here
Disabled and Here features BIPOC and disabled individuals from the Pacific Northwest.
Gender Spectrum Collection
The Gender Spectrum Collection represents trans and nonbinary communities.
Images of Empowerment
Images of Empowerment provides images of empowerment of women from around the world.
Humaaans
Humaaans is a public domain site for creators to design custom illustrations.
Image Finder
Image Finder is a repository of photographs representing diverse individuals and diverse categories.
Nappy
Nappy provides photographs of Black and Brown individuals representing diversity in Creative Commons.
The Noun Project
The Noun Project is a global visual language site with the goal of uniting users of the world.
Pexels
Pexels provides diverse photographs to empower creators.
Photos for Class
Photos for Class is a collection of diverse imagery from various Creative Commons resources.
WOC in Tech
WOC in Tech provides photographs of women of color in business settings.

Except where otherwise noted, content of this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0 license and is adapted from the Creative Commons Certification Course https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/ by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0.