Skip to Main Content

Open Educational Resources

This guide will help faculty select and use open educational resources.

MERLOT and TSU EXCEL4ed

MERLOT is a one-stop source for locating and creating educational resources.  

A TSU-specific version of MERLOT is TSU-EXCEL4ed.

Portals and collections of open educational resources

California Open Online Library for Education

Open Culture -- A vast collection of textbooks, feature films, courses, and other resources.

Mason OER Metafinder -- One-stop search mechanism for finding OERs, created by the George Mason University Library.

OER Commons-- " a public digital library of open educational resources."

Open Michigan -- OERs from the University of Michigan system.

UCI Open -- An open education initiative at the University of California Irvine.

OERTX -- Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board's OER portal

UNC System Course Enhancement and OER Collections -- Currently contains primarily math and sciences materials.

Courseware

MIT OpenCourseWare -- supplemental materials from MIT courses

OCW Scholar (MIT)  -- courses created from actual MIT course materials

OpenLearn (Open University, UK) -- free courses from Open University

Khan Academy -- video-based courses, primarily in STEM subjects

Open Yale Courses -- lectures, readings, and suggested syllabi from several dozen Yale courses

Alison -- Certificate and diploma-level courses in most fields.

Academic Earth -- an aggregator of university lectures

Open Learning Initiative (Carnegie Mellon University)

Delft University of Technology -- courseware in engineering and the environment

Harvard Open Courses

Johns Hopkins Open Course Ware

University of Oxford podcasts

PennState OER Courseware

Stanford Engineering Everywhere -- computer science, artificial intelligence, and linear systems

SUNY OER Services

UC San Diego

 

Collections of open access textbooks

Low-cost

OpenStax CNX -- textbooks in all disciplines (although weighted toward business and the sciences), elementary school through college

FreeTechBooks -- links to approximately 1200 books on mathematics, computer science, and programming

Open Textbook Library -- college textbooks in most areas

Free

BOOKBOON.com -- books in business and the sciences. Offers a free trial.

Flat World -- textbooks in all disciplines

Free ebooks

Bibliomania -- classic texts and study guides for them.

Electronic Open Stacks -- digital facsimiles at the University of Chicago Library.

The Online Library of Liberty -- digitized books from the library of the conservative Liberty Fund foundation.

Project Gutenberg -- over 57,000 free ebooks (mostly older works).

Rand Books and Publications -- books and periodicals (primarily 21st-century) on public policy.

HathiTrust  - a digital repository with over one million texts available.
Feedbooks -- books, primarily fiction, in the public domain.

Discovery tools

Collections of open access journals

ABC Chemistry

Academic Journals -- links to approximately 100 journals, with an emphasis on the sciences

BioMed Central

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) -- journals in most subjects

Google Scholar

OMICS International -- journals in the sciences

Oxford Open Journals -- a mixture of fully-open (mostly sciences) and limited open access

PubMed Central

Science Direct - Open Access (fully open access) -- almost 700 journals; some in the humanities and social sciences; a few in languages other than English

Science Direct - Open Access (contains open access) -- almost 2,000 journals

Springer Open -- approximately 200 journals, and 600 books, in a range of disciplines

Wiley Open Access -- journals in the sciences

Creative Commons license

This guide is based on the AffordaCreative Commons Licenseble Learning Solutions: Open Educational Resources by College from San Jose State University, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Under this license, you are free to copy and redistribute the material it contains in any medium or format. Also, you may remix, transform, and build upon the material. Authors of the original include Adriana Poo, Linda Crotty, Ann Agee, Christina Mune, Cory Laurence, Markita Dawson, Marva Tomer, and Michelle Chimento.

Data sets

Miscellaneous tools