LibGuides: Open Educational Resources @ The University of Baltimore: Finding OER

A Process for Adopting OER

When adopting/adapting OER materials for your class, you can follow the process illustrated below. Similar to research, you may find yourself repeating or skipping steps depending on your familiarity level with OER.

The steps are:

Set aside time: Searching for OER takes time and persistence just like research
Look at your current text: Is your current textbook available for free through the library databases.
Locate an OER text: Check to see if an OER textbook already exists for your course.
Browse open repositories: Browse several repositories to see what content isa vailable
Supplement: Look at your learning objectives and find different materials for different topicss
Ask for help: Contact a UB librarian for assistance!

This content is adapted from "Six Steps to OER", Library Research Guide on Open Educational Resources (OER), Northern Michigan College Librarians, and is used under a CC BY 4.0 license

OER Search Engines, Repositories & More

Academic Earth
Collection of online courses and video lectures from 25 universities including MIT, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and Princeton.
AMSER (Applied Math & Science Education Repository)
This 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.
Coerll - Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning
The Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL) is one of 16 National Foreign Language Resource Centers (LRC's) funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The overall mission of these federally-funded centers is to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages by producing resources (materials and best practices) that can be profitably employed in a variety of settings.
Cool4Ed
The California Open Education Resources Council, a collaboration among UC, CSU and CCC faculty, is facilitating the peer review of open textbooks which are showcased in the California Open Source Digital Library (COOL4Ed). Features free and open online materials for courses and how faculty are using free and open eTextbooks.
George Mason OER MetaFinder
George Mason University Libraries developed a one-stop search box for Open and Affordable Educational Resources.
MERLOT II
MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community. MERLOT does not house content, but is a collection of links to other content.
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW)
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.
M.O.S.T. Course Hub
A set of OER course materials available to Maryland Higher Ed Institutions made possible through a partnership with Lumen Learning.
OER Commons
OER Commons is a dynamic digital library and network. Explore open education resources and join our network of educators dedicated to curriculum improvement. OER Commons helps educators, students, and lifelong learners avoid time-consuming searches and find exactly the right materials. With a single point of access from which they can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons’ growing collection.
OER Consortium
The Open Education Consortium in collaboration with MERLOT offers a search engine on OER. General search yields results from the integrated database of the Open Education Consortium and MERLOT.
Online Writing Lab: Excelsior College
Excelsior College OWL is unique in its multimedia support for writers. It offers a wide variety of interactive multimedia activities, quizzes, videos, interactive PDFs, and games – all designed to help writers understand important concepts about writing.
Open Washington
Designed to help educators understand the OER movement and find OER. The site include links to finding content, images and videos as well as testimonials from faculty who have adopted OER.
The Orange Grove
Florida's Open Educational Resource Repository.
SkillsCommon
The US Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program has created a free and open online library called SkillsCommons containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development. The Open Educational Resources (OER) are produced by community colleges across the nation and can be found, reused, revised, retained, redistributed and remixed by individuals, institutions, and industry.
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.
Writing Commons
A free, comprehensive, peer-reviewed, award-winning Open Text for students and faculty in college-level courses that require writing and research.

Creative Commons Search

Search the web with Creative Commons filtered search engine to find web sites, articles, videos, images, and other resources licensed for sharing.

In addition to using the search engines and repositories linked on this guide, you can also use advanced search features when searching Google, YouTube or Flickr, to find and locate OER. You will still need to confirm the individual license of the object you select to assure it meets the appropriate CC license.

Google - Use the Advanced Search. Under Usage Rights select to limit your results to resources which are free to use, modify or share. More from Google on Usage Rights.

YouTube - After searching by keyword in YouTube, use the Filters feature to filter your results to videos with a Creative Commons License. Looking for more videos? View the Images, Audio & Video tab!

Flickr - After searching by keyword in Flickr, use the Any License filter feature to filter your results to the appropriate usage license which best suits your usage of the work. Looking for more images? View the Images, Audio & Video tab!

Creative Commons Search - Please note that search.creativecommons.org is not a search engine, but rather offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations.

Government Publications

Everything published by the Federal government is free of any copyright restrictions. The research, reports and websites can be useful resources for classes when creating your own course material.

A great starting place to search is USA.gov.
Try to search a specific agency's website. A-Z List of Federal Agencies. Many times these materials are not retrieved with simple Google searches. Here are some examples of US Federal Databases.

The Homeland Security Digital Library is a collection of documents related to homeland security policy, strategy, and organizational management. Topics include maritime, unmanned aerial systems, terrorism, epidemics and many more.

SciTech Connect is a collection of science, technology, and engineering research information from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Low-Cost OER Repositories & Courses

If you need to consult additional sources, you can visit one of the websites below. The OER cohort participants have access to Lumen Learning materials through the M.O.S.T. initiative.

Lumen Learning
Supports faculty in identifying and selecting high quality OER, aligning these to learning outcomes, and assembling them to create OER-based courses.
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.

Attribution

This LibGuide is a derivative of the Austin Community College Library Services Guide on Open Educational Resources created by Carrie Gits and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.