Open Education Resources – Collections
Good Collections to Start Exploring
Open education resources (OERs) are defined in many ways. UNESCO defines them as teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.
Finding good resources for your courses takes time. Since there are many collections hosted by different organizations, each has their own way of organizing and searching resouces. Some like MERLOT are ‘referratories’ pointing to resources hosted on other sites but they also provide feedback and ratings from users. Other collections are sub-sets or curated lists of larger collections like OER Commons Curated Collections. We’ve included a music and image collection of resources.
BASE
https://www.base-search.net/
BASE is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 150 million documents from more than 7,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
BCcampus Open Textbook Collection
https://collection.bccampus.ca/
The B.C. Open Textbook Collection is home to a growing selection of open textbooks for a variety of subjects and specialties. Discover open textbooks that have been reviewed by faculty, meet our accessibility requirements, and/or include ancillary materials (quizzes, test banks, slides, videos, etc.).
OASIS
https://oasis.geneseo.edu/index.php
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 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records. OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo’s Milne Library.
Libre Texts
https://libretexts.org/
The LibreText Project, a leading, non-commercial open textbook organization initiated at the University of California, Davis. The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.
OER Commons Curated Collections
https://www.oercommons.org/curated-collections
OER Commons forges alliances between trusted content providers and creative users and re-users of OER. In addition to content partnerships, OER Commons, and its creator, ISKME, builds strategic relationships with organizations, consortia, states, districts, and others, in order to develop innovation and new research focused on OER, to advance the field of open education, and to build models for its sustainability. Supported in part by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, created OER Commons as part of the Foundation’s worldwide OER initiative. Part of OER Commons https://www.oercommons.org/
National Science Digital Library
https://nsdl.oercommons.org/
The National Science Digital Library provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines—both formal and informal, institutional and individual, in local, state, national, and international educational settings. The NSDL collection contains structured descriptive information (metadata) about web-based educational resources held on other sites by their providers.
MERLOT
https://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
The MERLOT project began in 1997, when the California State University Center for Distributed Learning (CSU-CDL at cdl.edu) developed and provided free access to MERLOT (www.merlot.org). In July, 2000, twenty-three (23) systems and institutions of higher education had become Institutional Partners of MERLOT. Each Institutional Partner contributed $25,000 and in-kind support for eight faculty and a project director (part-time) to coordinate MERLOT activities. The CSU continued its leadership of and responsibilities for the operation and improvement of processes and tools.
CCMixter
http://ccmixter.org/
Download, cut up, mix share. Open music for anyone to use.
Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/
The internet’s source of freely-usable images.
Pexels
https://www.pexels.com/
Free stock photos and videos.
Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/
Free images and royalty free stock video and music
Ted Ed Lessons
https://ed.ted.com/lessons
TED-Ed’s mission is to spark and celebrate the ideas of teachers and students around the world. Everything we do supports learning — from producing a growing library of original animated videos , to providing an international platform for teachers to create their own interactive lessons, to helping curious students around the globe bring TED to their schools and gain presentation literacy skills, to celebrating innovative leadership within TED-Ed’s global network of over 250,000 teachers.