Finding OER

Quality OER resources are becoming easier to find as awareness spreads and more organizations support OER development.

OER are collected into various repositories. These repositories vary in the types of OER they collect, and it is typically good to search numerous repositories for OER that may fit a course. A list of repositories is provided below. Many repositories also provide tools to help faculty customize OER for their courses.

OER Repositories

Canadian Resources:  eCampus Ontario and BC Campus OpenEd
British Columbia(opens in new window) and Ontario(opens in new window) have dedicated resources to help their faculty write and find free ebooks and other educational resources. Their easy to use (and seemingly shared) search engines help faculty find, adopt, and adapt resources for their use. Resources here have been peer-reviewed using a traditional method. Additionally, these sites provide information to potential authors about using PressBooks, their preferred platform.

College Open Textbooks 
"This collection(opens in new window) of sixteen educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges." Digital textbooks available here are under various CC licenses and faculty can review textbooks at this site.

COOLforED 
The California Open Online Library for Education (COOLforED)(opens in new window) provides course resources and faculty showcases that are searchable by course or California school where they are used. It provides additional resources to search for OER for your course or topic too. You can also search this database to see what other Chico State faculty are using.

LibreTexts 
LibreTexts houses a large free repository of OER organized by discipline, as well as offers tools to faculty to be able to adapt and remix various OER. 

Merlot   
MERLOT(opens in new window) is a curated collection of over 100,000 online learning and support materials. 

OER Commons 
Here(opens in new window) you can search for resources at any grade level (including college lower division, upper division, and graduate/professional) and they also have resources for potential authors, faculty wanting to build interactive modules, and more. 

Open Book Publishers 
This(opens in new window) is a collection of peer-reviewed textbooks under CC licenses, many are CC BY. PDF and HTML formats are free, while ePub and print versions are available at low costs.  

Open Textbook Library 
Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost. Open Textbook Library(opens in new window) is supported by the Open Education Network(opens in new window).

OpenStax   
OpenStax(opens in new window) (formerly Connexions) is associated with Rice University and has developed digital textbooks for high need and high enrollment classes. These edited and peer-reviewed texts are available in Epub or PDF formats, or can be ordered printed for a low cost.OpenStax textbooks and images are licensed under CC-BY. 

PLOS (Public Library of Science)   
“Articles and accompanying materials published by PLOS on the PLOS Sites(opens in new window), unless otherwise indicated, are licensed by the respective authors of such articles for use and distribution by you subject to citation of the original source in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.”

Saylor Foundation 
Saylor academy(opens in new window) has developed OER textbooks, but is also responsible for developing online courses. Saylor's Bookshelf page contains over 100 full length textbooks.

Teaching Commons  
The Teaching Commons(opens in new window) is a collection of textbooks, courses materials and more from many colleges and universities and is curated by librarians. It is searchable by institution, material type, and subject area.

Resources to Help Evaluate OER

• Evaluating Course Materials Checklist (Google Doc) (OER Starter Guide)
• Open Education Resource Repository Rubric(opens in new window) (BCOEL Librarians Working Group)
• Faculty guide for evaluating open educational resources (PDF) (BCcampus)
• iRubric: Evaluating OER rubric(opens in new window) (Mcbrarian) 
• Rubrics for evaluating open educational resource (OER) objects (PDF) (Achieve)