Research Guides: Open Educational Resources (OER) Sustainable Learning: General

Places to Find OERs

by opensourceway

Use the ISBN of Your Current Textbook to Find Free Alternatives

CSU Affordable Learning Solutions

UnPaywall is a browser extension that connects you to open access versions of articles when they're available.
Open Access Button is a browser extension to help find open access articles and open data. If an item is paywalled, the project will start a request for you to access the research.

Open Textbook Collections

BC Campus Open Ed
A collection of textbooks on literature, communication, and writing.
Grand Valley State University
A small but growing collection of open educational resources authored by faculty at GVSU and hosted by the university's open-access repository, ScholarWorks@GVSU.
LibreTexts
The libraries are part of a huge network that provides not just single textbooks, but an infinitely large library on various subjects through which new texts can be developed & shared.
MERLOT
MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.
Milne Open Textbooks
Milne Open Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants.
OAPEN
Both a collection of open access publications and a publishing platform with a focus on social sciences and humanities.
OER Commons
OER Commons provides a curated collection of textbooks and resources for Anthropology, Archaeology, Ethnic Studies, and Linguistics.
OpenStax College
OpenStax College offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers.
Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.
Pressbooks OER
The BCcampus Open Education OER by Discipline Guide lists a wide range of open educational resources organized by discipline.

Courses and Videos

Cool4Ed Course Showcase
Look up materials by course number for selected courses used across the CSU, UC and CCC systems.
Coursera
Every course on Coursera is taught by top instructors from the world’s best universities and educational institutions. Courses include recorded video lectures, auto-graded and peer-reviewed assignments, and community discussion forums. When you complete a course, you’ll receive a sharable electronic Course Certificate.
edX
Find free online courses in poetry, art history, world cultures, classical art, modern art and European painting from top universities worldwide. Learn the Cultural Geography of the World from Peking University or immerse yourself in Harvard University’s popular Poetry in America series.
Future Learn
Learn 100% online with world class universities and industry experts. Develop hobbies, new skills and career-changing expertise with our flexible courses.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. We tackle math, science, computer programming, history, art history, economics, and more.
MIT Open Courseware
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.
Open Learn
Open Learn provides various courses on creative writing and the English language.
Open Yale
Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, exams, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.
PRIMO
PRIMO is a means to promote and share peer-reviewed instructional materials created by librarians to teach people about discovering, accessing and evaluating information in networked environments. The Committee hopes that publicizing selective, high quality resources will help librarians to respond to the educational challenges posed by still emerging digital technologies.
Saylor Academy
Collection of PDF versions of textbooks on various topics. HTML versions are also available.
TED Ed: Lessons Worth Sharing
Build a lesson around any TED-Ed Original, TED Talk or YouTube video
University Videos
This Digital Library portal contains the metadata of the YouTube Channels of the world's Top Universities.

Additional Resources

ArXiv
Open access to Cornell University's E-Prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.
Digital Public Library of America
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Exhibitions are designed to tell stories of national significance using source materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, including letters, photographs, posters, oral histories, video clips, sheet music, and more.
HathiTrust
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
The HumBox Project
The HumBox website was created by the HumBox project. This project was part of a wider Open Educational Resources initiative funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the HEA, to showcase UK Higher Education by encouraging teachers within HE institutions to publish excellent teaching and learning resources openly on the web.
Internet Archive: Digital Library
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Memrise
Uses images and audio to help memorize vocabulary. Interactive site that saves individual progress.
National Academy Press
Many free read-online or free PDF download options.
OER World Map
The OER World Map collects and visualizes data on the growing number of actors and activities in the field of open education worldwide. The goal is to accelerate the evolution of the global OER ecosystem by providing a comprehensive and responsive picture of the OER movement.
Open Washington
Open Educational Resources Network's goal is to provide easy pathways for faculty to learn, find, use and apply OER.
Project Gutenberg
This list contains but a small sampling of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century anthropological writings by ethnologists and other scholars.
Ubiquity Press
Open access publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and data.
Wikibooks
Hosted by the Wikimedia foundation, Wikibooks is an open content textbook collection spanning a variety of reading levels and disciplines.

Discipline Specific OERs

Are you interested in working to curate the best OER for your discipline? Help us make this page better and send your favorite resources to HSUpress@humboldt.edu.

The HSU Sustainable Learning initiative is aimed at supporting faculty adopting or creating OER. Participants are provided with support from the Library and College of eLearning- become part of the campus community working on creating and adopting OER, and earn a $300 stipend for participating. Find out more at https://library.humboldt.edu/about/sustainable.html.

Creative Commons Licensing 101

Most Open Educational Resources have Creative Commons licenses, which allows you to use the content freely- but there are some requirements to be mindful of. Watch for these different types of restrictions:

BY
Attribution: all creative commons licenses require that you give credit to the content creator.
ND
No Derivatives: some licenses do not let you modify the content you reuse.
SA
Share Alike: some licenses require that you adopt the same license restrictions when you reuse content.
NC
Non-Commercial: some licenses do not allow reuse for commercial ventures (most educational use at HSU is not commercial). more info

Choosing a Creative Commons License

Creating an OER and don't know how to license your content? Take a look at these useful resources from creativecommons.org:

Choose a License
Creativecommons.org widget for choosing a license for your project.
Considerations for licensors and licensees
Overview of the issues involved in selecting a license for your content.
Examples of Creative Commons License Use
The Growing Commons section is a list of real-world examples helps to illustrate the features of the licenses applied to different types of content.
Marking your work with a CC license
This guide illustrates how to clearly mark your content with your chosen license.
License Downloads
Use these images to mark your content- image files are in png, svg and eps formats.