Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials that are available for educators to use for free. That means that there are little to no copyright rules attached to these resources which gives educators the ability to use them freely in their courses without obtaining permission from the creator, or following copyright regulations.
Education Week: Open Educational Resources (OER): Overview and Definition
RMIT University: What are OERs
Creative Commons: Open Education
Barton Community College OER Instruction Guide : Information for instructors who would like guidance building their course content with OER
Moving to Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University: A Case Study
Open Pedagogy: A Systematic Review of Empirical Findings
A Survey of OER Implementations in 13 Higher Education Institutions
Merlot II : One of the largest databases for finding and sharing OER
OASIS: A creation of SUNY, this database has 55,000+ records from 52 different reviewed sources
OER Commons: Searchable digital library of OER
Lumen Learning: Peer reviewed curriculum on many different subjects. LMS integration is available
MIT OpenCourseWare: MIT courses available for free - includes video lectures, supplemental materials and more
OpenLearn: free learning platform created in the UK
panOpen: platform that helps institutional adoption of Open Educational Resources - courses, OER database and more
Saylor Academy: nonprofit initiative that offers free and open online courses
KCTCS faculty and staff have on-demand access to over 500 professional development sessions through Innovative Educator/Go2Knowledge and Magna Commons. These two repositories provide a robust library of relevant topics including teaching and learning, student success, diversity, safety, management, leadership, and more.
Both repositories can be accessed through Blackboard. They are located in the “Professional Development Repositories” module on the main landing page once you login. These resources can also be accessed from the TLC (Training & Learning) site.
In addition to the on-demand PD, you also have access to live webinars through Innovative Educators/Go2Knowledge. KCTCS employees can register for free.
Finally, Magna Campus provides vetted and cutting edge professional development resources on our 20-Minute Mentor Commons and Magna Commons.
University of Pittsburgh: Big List of Resources: Includes links to textbook resources, multimedia, and curriculum based around OER
University of Houston Victoria: Discipline Specific OER: OER sorted by general academic discipline
Texas A&M Library: List of OER: Has links to full OER curriculum courses, multimedia resources, open access scholarly articles
BCampus OpenEd: Open access textbooks, not all may be reviewed
OpenStax: Peer reviewed college level textbooks
Open Textbook Library: Hundreds of open access college level textbooks
Directory of Open Access Books: Open access academic books, includes international publications
JSTOR Open Access E-Books: Open access eBooks from select university presses
Project Gutenberg: Open access books that are in the public domain
Works in the public domain may be used without permission, and in general, the older a work is, the more likely it is to be in the public domain. Helpful links are included here.
