Finding OER Materials
General OER Repositories/Directories
Open education is a globally recognized approach to instruction, and numerous professionals around the world have developed OERs to support this pedagogical perspective. Agencies and organizations have developed extensive repositories of OERs, many of which include more than one document type or media format, to facilitate their discovery and use. Below are several for your consideration. Each is browsable by subject area and can be searched using keyword terms. [adapted from the UT Austin Libraries - https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/OER]
- MERLOTThe 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.
- MERLOT - SMART Search tutorialYouTube video tutorial demonstrating basic search techniques in MERLOT
- MERLOT - ISBN search tutorialYouTube video tutorial on searching MERLOT for indexed OER materials that align with a known title using the ISBN of the published resource
- OER CommonsOER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.
- OER Commons - navigation tutorialYouTube video tutorial on searching the OER Commons for materials of interest. Produced by the School of Learning
- OpenStax - search tutorialYouTube video tutorial on searching OpenStax for OER materials. Produced by the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Library
- Open Textbook LibraryOpen textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. The library currently includes 790 textbooks, with more being added all the time.
- Open Textbook Library - search tutorialYouTube video tutorial on searching the Open Textbook Library repository for OER materials. Produced by the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Library
- LibreTextsThe 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.
- Pressbooks DirectoryPressbooks is an open publishing platform designed to facilitate the development, distribution, and use of open textbooks and related materials.
OER Search Tools
Use one of the following search engines to find OER options across multiple repository collections.
- Mason OER MetafinderThe Mason OER Metafinder helps you find Open Educational Resources. Unlike other OER discovery sites (e.g, OER Commons, OASIS, MERLOT, OpenStax, etc.) with our Metafinder you aren’t searching a static database that we’ve built. Instead, the OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 21 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button.
- Open Textbook StoreOpenTextBookStore was created by educators frustrated with the time involved in finding adoptable open textbooks, with the hope to make open textbook adoption easier for other faculty.
OER Repositories by Subject/Discipline
- Big List of OER Resources - U Pittsburgh Extensive list of OER materials curated by the University of Pittsburgh Library.
- Find OER by discipline - Virginia Tech Curated lists of resources maintained by the Virginia Tech Libraries. Sorted by discipline and subject category.
- OER by Discipline - U Houston-Victoria Brief list of materials by select disciplines curated by the University of Houston-Victoria Libraries.
- Textbook Equity Open Education Free college level textbooks with Creative Commons Licenses. Royalty-free. Low-Cost Print.
- Open Textbooks @ Virginia TechOpen Textbooks are freely available online and licensed for redistribution. Some open textbooks are also licensed for editing and modification. For more information about Virginia Tech Libraries' Open Education Initiative, see our OER Guide.
Open and Public Domain Image, Video, and Media Collections
Use these links to locate stock photos, illustrations, videos, and other media resources that can be incorporated into textbooks or other course materials. Be sure to review the license and usage guidelines before adding them to your class materials.
- AllGo Plus-Size Stock PhotosCollection of stock photos o plus-size people engaged in a variety of everyday activities.
- Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Bavarian State Painting Collections)With its Online Collection, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Bavarian State Painting Collections) is making its entire holdings accessible to the public for the first time: that’s 25,000 artworks in Bavaria, Germany and Europe viewable on a single platform! It is now possible to have an overview not only of all the artworks on display in the Munich galleries – the Alte and Neue Pinakothek, the Sammlung Moderne Kunst in the Pinakothek der Moderne, the Museum Brandhorst and the Sammlung Schack – and in the other state galleries of Bavaria (several thousand works in total), but also of works in the museum storerooms (17,000 works) and more than 4000 works on permanent loan from the Munich collections to over 400 sites, some belonging to institutions which are only partly open to the public.
- CDC Public Health Image LibraryMuch of the information critical to the communication of public health messages is pictorial rather than text-based. Created by a Working Group at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the PHIL offers an organized, universal electronic gateway to CDC's pictures. We welcome public health professionals, the media, laboratory scientists, educators, students, and the worldwide public to use this material for reference, teaching, presentation, and public health messages.
- Disabled and HereDisabled And Here is a disability-led stock image and interview series celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC).
- Gender Spectrum CollectionThe Gender Spectrum Collection is a stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés. This collection aims to help media better represent members of these communities as people not necessarily defined by their gender identities—people with careers, relationships, talents, passions, and home lives.
- Images of EmpowermentA free library of images celebrating women's lives and their work in 11 countries around the world.
- The Kunstmuseum Basel Collections OnlineThe Kunstmuseum Basel’s Collection Online website provides over 4,100 photographs of our works for download; all images are in the public domain.
- LACMA CollectionsLocated on the Pacific Rim, LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection of nearly 152,000 objects that illuminate 6,000 years of artistic expression across the globe. Committed to showcasing a multitude of art histories, LACMA exhibits and interprets works of art from new and unexpected points of view that are informed by the region’s rich cultural heritage and diverse population. LACMA’s spirit of experimentation is reflected in its work with artists, technologists, and thought leaders as well as in its regional, national, and global partnerships to share collections and programs, create pioneering initiatives, and engage new audiences. Can filter results to display images in the public domain.
- The Lenbacchaus Online CollectionNot all images are openly licensed. See https://www.lenbachhaus.de/en/sharing-and-adapting
- Library of Congress Prints & PhotographsRights assessment is your responsibility.
As a publicly supported institution, the Library generally does not own rights to material in its collections. Therefore, it does not charge permission fees for use of such material and cannot give or deny permission to publish or otherwise distribute material in its collections. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in the Library's collections. - The Met CollectionPhotographic catalog of pieces held in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY. Some images have open access licenses permitting their use in OER creations.
- Minneapolis Institute of Art Public Domain ImagesFor more information about their open access initiatives, see https://collections.artsmia.org/info/open-access
- Munch Museet (Norway)The creative works of Edvard Munch, many of which are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- Nappy.coBeautiful photos of Black and Brown people, for free. For commercial and personal use.
- NASA ImagesNASA's image library, images.nasa.gov, consolidates imagery and videos in one searchable location. Users can download content in multiple sizes and resolutions and see the metadata associated with images, including EXIF/camera data on many images.
- National Gallery of Art (U.S.) Open Access ImagesThe National Gallery of Art has an open access policy for images of works of art in our permanent collection which the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are available for download free of charge for any use, whether commercial or non-commercial.
Open Access image downloads are now available directly from the object pages located on this website. Over 50,000 images are available for download, and we will continue to add more images for free access as more works are photographed and as works of art enter the public domain. - National Library of Medicine Digital CollectionsDigital Collections provides access to the National Library of Medicine's distinctive digital content in the areas of biomedicine, health care and the history of medicine. Our unique digital collections are freely available for download worldwide and in the public domain unless otherwise indicated.
- NOAA Photo LibraryThe NOAA Photo Library collections reflect NOAA’s broad mission of advancing science “from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the Sun.” Images within the NOAA Photo Library are contributed by NOAA staff and help depict NOAA’s work to explain and interpret our changing environment. The collection includes thousands of weather and space images, hundreds of images of shores and coastal seas, and thousands of marine species images ranging from whales to the most minute plankton. Images in the NOAA Photo Library are in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted. There is no fee for downloading any images on the site. Educational use is encouraged as the primary goal of the NOAA Photo Library is to help all understand our oceans and atmosphere.
- Noun ProjectIcons and art-quality photo collections designed to promote diversity and gender equity in visual representations.
- NYPL Digital CollectionsThe New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Collections platform is the primary portal for engaging with our digitized collections and their descriptions, over 922,495 items and counting. While that is a small fraction of the Library's overall holdings, it is representative of the diversity of our vast collections—from books to videos, maps to manuscripts, illustrations to photos, and more.
- OpenVerseOpenVerse (formerly CC Search) is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. This tool searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution.
- Paris MuseesHousing over one million works of art, the fourteen museums of the City of Paris present collections that are exceptional for their diversity and high quality. These collections bear witness to the history of Paris and the evolution of its patrimony, as well as to its leading figures and, more generally, to the place reserved for art and culture in the city’s development. For the past several years, these items have been the focus of documentation campaigns, digitizing and photography. This endeavor has been accompanied by the increasing availability of high-resolution digital reproductions of works in the public domain that are free of charge and can be used without restrictions.
- PicnoiWe are a coop of stock image photography. We recognize that most other FREE stock image sites have very few or no images of people of color. We sought out to create a space where publishers, bloggers, website owners, marketers, designers, graphic artists, advertisers and the like can easily search and find diverse multi-racial images. Feel free to use any photo on this site. You do NOT NEED to attribute but we’d very happy if you could give site and link credit to picnoi.
- Prelinger ArchivesPublic domain videos from advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur film sources.
- Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) StudioMost of the images are eligible for open use. See https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/research/image-requests
- Smithsonian Open AccessWelcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
- Statens Museum for Kunst, CophehagenWith support from Nordea-fonden the SMK Open project (2016-2020) aims to make the country’s art collection available for free use. Everyone should have the opportunity to explore the world of art on their own terms and draw information from SMK’s large collection of knowledge and additional material. With SMK Open, we’re turning the collection into a giant tool-box full of freely usable building blocks.
- UnsplashThe internet’s source of freely usable images. Powered by creators everywhere.
- USGS ImagesExplore our planet through photography and imagery, including climate change and water all the way back to the 1800s when the USGS was surveying the country by horse and buggy.
- The Wellcome CollectionWellcome Collection is a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we all think and feel about health. Through exhibitions, collections, live programming, digital, broadcast and publishing, we create opportunities for people to think deeply about the connections between science, medicine, life and art.
- WikiMedia CommonsImages, audio files, and video files, most of which are in the public domain
- WOCinTech photosPhotos of women and non-binary people of color in the tech field
- Yale University Art GalleryBuilding on Yale’s commitment to open access, if a work is believed to be in the public domain and free of other restrictions, digital images of the work are made available for download through the Gallery’s online collection. On each object record for which digital images exist, the rights status or rights holder is listed immediately under the main image, on the left-hand side of the page. Visit the Rights and Reproductions page for more information on the rights status of each work and how available images may be used. If the work is in the public domain and images can be downloaded, a download link will appear beneath the image. See https://artgallery.yale.edu/using-images
OER Basics - Courses and Tutorials
- OER Starter KitThe OER Starter Kit Workbook is a remix of the OER Starter Kit to include worksheets to help instructors practice the skills they need to confidently find, use, or even create open educational resources (OER). We welcome instructors, librarians, instructional designers, administrators, and anyone else interested in OER to explore the OER Starter Kit Workbook. By Abbey Elder and Stacy Katz at CUNY.
- Open Educational Practice and Professional LearningComprehensive list of courses, guides, and tutorials on Open Educational Practices including the OER Commons Virtual Academy
- Finding Free and Open ResourcesA chapter-by-chapter informational tutorial for educators interested in replacing expensive commercial textbooks with affordable resources. Developed by the University System of Georgia.
- OER ToolkitOpen Educational Resources (OER) provide equal access to resources at no cost to students. This toolkit provides information and tools to help faculty and library staff across all publicly funded colleges in Ontario to understand, engage with, and sustain OER in their work and practice. Produced by the College Libraries of Ontario.
- Intro to Open EducationThis website supports the Fall 2018 offering of IPT 531: Introduction to Open Education at Brigham Young University, taught by David Wiley and Olga Belikov. And because it’s published openly, it also contains all the information you need to participate informally in the class. You can read the readings, watch the videos, create and share the artifacts, and participate in the course discussions on Twitter, blogs, and elsewhere.
- Open Education Leadership Program CurriculumThe SPARC Open Education Leadership Program curriculum runs over two semesters, corresponding to the academic year. It begins with an intensive online course in the fall, followed by an independent capstone project with mentorship support in the spring. Fellows complete the program as part of a cohort of peers that adds a rich layer of ongoing support, community, and knowledge-sharing on top of the curriculum. The program is facilitated by an instructor who provides ongoing feedback, support, and evaluation.
Evaluating OERs
As an instructor, you likely already have a set of evaluation criteria you use in textbook selection. Additional issues to consider when dealing with OER materials include:
- Use: Is the license open? Can you share, reuse, and remix the content freely? Are there copyright or other legal restrictions?
- Format: Does the material come in a format your students can access easily? Is special software required? Can the material be printed or purchased in print at a low cost?
For rubrics to use in your assessment, consider the following:
- iRubric: Evaluating OER Open access rubric that is freely available for use and modification.
- Faculty guide for evaluating OER - BCOER A checklist created by the BCOER, a group of BC post-secondary librarians working together to support the use of quality Open Educational Resources (OER). For more information about BCOER and its activities, go to open.bccampus.ca.
Adopting OERs
Adopting an OER is a matter simply of adding a link in the syllabus and letting students know that it is free (or low-cost) to access and use.
For guidance, consider one of the following:
- BCcampus Open Education Adoption Guide Adoption Guide - 2nd Edition by Lauri Aesoph, BCcampus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
- Open Textbook Adoption Woksheet This Worksheet was developed by Dr. Judy Baker, Director of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. January 21, 2008 and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. For examples of each Step, see http://cnx.org/content/m15767/latest/
- Adopting Open Educational Resources in the Classroom This course provides faculty with an introduction to the laws that influence the use, re-use, and distribution of content they may want to use in a course. Activities include finding openly licensed content for use in a class and publishing openly licensed works created by faculty. At the end of the course, students will have openly licensed content that will be ready for use in a course.
Baylor Research Guides Containing OER Suggestions
The following guides include links to OER materials appropriate for the indicated disciplines. Some of the guides have OER suggestions explicitly identified in a separate box location whereas others have the materials integrated into the broad list of academic resources available.
