Faculty Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER)

GALILEO Open Learning Materials brings together open educational resources throughout the University System of Georgia, including open textbooks and ancillary materials.

Lumen Courseware: Lumen’s affordable course materials are designed to strengthen learning using open educational resources (OER). They provide high quality, interactive learning content, online homework, and personalized feedback to help them study and learn more effectively, with plenty of opportunities to engage students in active learning. We apply learning science principles and analyze learning data to identify where students struggle and make targeted improvements that strengthen learning.

"The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder webpages, together with associated comments, and bookmark collections, all intended to enhance the teaching experience of using a learning material. All of these items have been contributed by the MERLOT member community, who have either authored the materials themselves, or who have discovered the materials, found them useful, and wished to share their enthusiasm for the materials with others in the teaching and learning community. All the materials in MERLOT are reviewed for suitability for retention in the collection. Many undergo the more extensive "peer review" for which MERLOT is famous. All material URL's in the collection are reviewed frequently for sustainability."

These books are available for you to use, keep, revise, and share under open licenses.
Saylor Academy does not own the copyright to any books on this page. Each book’s open license is an agreement between you as the end user and the copyright holder.

Since faculty often have a hard time knowing where to start with OER or where to look for them, TeachOER offers faculty a catalog to browse purveyors and websites that host openly licensed materials. As you will see on the site, OER can range from open access (free) textbooks, to lesson plans, to educational videos, to interactive websites, and more.

The Teaching Commons showcases high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities and makes them available to educators and students around the world. Curated by librarians and their institutions and hosted by bepress, the Teaching Commons includes open-access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, lectures, k-12 materials, and more.

The Open Textbook Library was started at the University of Minnesota. It is now part of the Open Education Network. Open Textbook Library is a comprehensive resource for openly licensed academic textbooks. All textbooks are free and the majority are peer reviewed.

The BC Campus textbook repository is a huge collection of textbooks developed for use in colleges and universities in British Columbia. Keep in mind that measurements and other information might differ from standards in the U.S. The textbook search engine allows for keyword and subject-based searching.

OpenStax is part of Rice University. They publish high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are free online and low cost in print. OpenStax textbook projects are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable and accurate, meet the scope and sequence requirements of each course, are supported by instructor ancillaries, and are available with the latest technology-based learning tools.

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.

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, computing, history, art history, economics, and more, including K-14 and test preparation (SAT, Praxis, LSAT) content. We focus on skill mastery to help learners establish strong foundations, so there's no limit to what they can learn next!

SkillsCommons is a free and open online library containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development. The Open Educational Resources (OER) are produced by community colleges across the nation and can be found, reused, revised, retained, redistributed and remixed by individuals, institutions, and industry.

is a digital public library and collaboration platform that offers openly licensed lectures, textbooks, full courses, games and assessments for K-12 and higher ed. Basic and advanced search by subject education level, and standard.

This guide includes a short list of ebooks related to criminal justice with summaries.

On this page you will find several open Criminal Justice textbooks along with supplemental material.

This guide includes a list of OER textbooks and supplementary materials for education with content summaries.

Includes Arts, History, Languages, Linguistics, Literature, Rhetoric& Poetry, Philosophy, & Religion.

LORO contains resources for language teaching available to download and reuse, including those used by the Department of Languages at the Open University, UK.

The Open RN project is led by Chippewa Valley Technical College as part of the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) consortium. OER nursing textbooks and virtual simulations are collaboratively developed by faculty based on the WTCS State Nursing curriculum and the current NCLEX-RN Test Plan. Textbooks undergo national peer review by faculty, deans, industry members, and nursing students to ensure the content is accurate and relevant, written in clear language for pre-licensure nursing students, and based on current, evidence-based practices. All Open RN materials have CC-BY 4.0 Creative Commons licensing.

Open RN textbooks are published in Pressbooks where they are free and accessible in online or downloadable formats. The textbooks are also uploaded to LibreTexts where they can easily be "remixed" by faculty and aligned to their curriculum. Affordable print versions are published by XanEdu and available in college bookstores and on Amazon.

ChemCollective must be used as is, without editing.

The ChemCollective is a collection of virtual labs, scenario-based learning activities, tutorials, and concept tests. Teachers can use our content for pre-labs, for alternatives to textbook homework, and for in-class activities for individuals or teams. Students can review and learn chemistry concepts using our virtual labs, simulations, and tutorials. The ChemCollective is organized by a group of faculty and staff at Carnegie Mellon who are interested in using, assessing, and creating engaging online activities for chemistry education.

The CSD Teaching Subset is a 700+ structure subset carefully selected to enhance chemistry learning The CSD Teaching Subset includes a wide variety of molecules and can be used to enhance chemistry learning across the curriculum. By integrating crystal structures into your course you will provide your students with the chance to visualise and manipulate molecules in 3D and to work with real measured data.

"Advanced Labs intends to provide a central, comprehensive information base for college/university faculty who teach upper-level undergraduate laboratories. These include, but are not limited to, labs in electronics, condensed matter, optics, atomic physics, mechanics, and the like -- and also researched-based, independent-study labs. Advanced Labs is produced by the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). It is a part of ComPADRE, the online collection of resources in physics and astronomy education, which itself is a part of the National Science Foundation-funded National Science Digital Library (NSDL)."

“A free, open source, online course management system for mathematics and other quantitative fields,” is an exceptional example of a tool for sharing open ancillary materials. The site does require a login to ensure that only instructors can access the answers to exercises, but otherwise, its content is open and free to access.

This section contains tools for teachers to enhance scientific learning in the classroom. From experimental ideas to drive home core scientific concepts and research skills to videos to make learning more enjoyable, we hope these resources will help to inspire the next generation of researchers.

Interactive math and science simulations (subjects included are physics, chemistry, math, earth science, biology)

These on-demand SciFinder® training resources are short, targeted materials, organized by search type.

The three State of California systems of higher education are working together to provide access to FREE and OPEN eTextbooks.