About Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this permission is granted by use of an open license (for example, Creative Commons licenses) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere. Read more about OER at SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).
Required materials, like textbooks, can represent a significant cost to students. A recent U.S. PIRG study found that the cost of textbooks has risen over four times the rate of inflation. Instructors can directly influence the cost of education for their students by adopting low- or no-cost course materials. The boxes below provide some starting points for discovering OER for your course. For further help, please contact your library liaison or instructional technologist.
Grant opportunity
Please read more here about an opportunity for a stipend of up to $1,500 to incorporate OER materials into a Trinity course.
OER Repositories
- Merlot IIA vast, peer reviewed repository of educator-submitted materials for use in higher ed.
- MIT Open CoursewareWeb-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
OER Search engines
- College Open textbooksListings by discipline along with a search engine for open textbooks.
- Merlot II's ISBN searchWhen you search by ISBN, you can find MERLOT Open Educational Resources (OER) that can be used to supplement most textbooks.
- OER CommonsOER Commons has partnered with content providers so that you can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons' growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER.
Textbooks
- OpenStaxBased at Rice University, OpenStax is one of the most widely used producers of open textbooks.
- Open Textbook LibraryThese books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.
About this guide
Content adapted from "Open Educational Resources" compiled by Colleen Lyon, University of Texas Libraries.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.