Wolfgram Subject Guides: Open Educational Resources (OERs): Finding OERs

How to Find OERs from Open Oregon

Finding OERs

LibreTexts
An effort of the California state University system, the LibreTexts platform combines extensive textbook holdings with digital features such as integrated code-running widgets or example files. This organization has a large staff and an active community.
Open Textbook Library
Open 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.
Open Stax
OpenStax is a nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University, We publish high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print.
MIT Online Textbooks
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
Milne Open Textbooks
Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.

Open Yale Courses
Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.
MIT Open Courseware
MIT Open Courseware offers resources to help you learn independently. The courses are based on materials MIT students use in classrooms and also include special custom-created content. The materials are arranged in logical sequences and supplemented with multimedia such as video lectures, help-session videos, and simulations.
Open Michigan
Open Michigan enables the University of Michigan community to make the products of its research, teaching, and creative work available to the world beyond campus. We are the home for all things open at the University of Michigan—including expertise and services for open educational resources, open data, and open publications.
Open Learning Initiative
The Open Learning Initiative is a flagship project of Carnegie Mellon Univeristy's Simon Initiative, offering textbook-replacement course content built upon principles gleaned from decades of research in three CMU’s strengths: cognitive science, computer engineering, and human-computer interaction. OLI provides a harmonious platform for delivering high-quality materials with the ability to facilitate groundbreaking research — in technology enhanced learning (TEL), data science, learning behavior, and more.
Open Couse Library
Washington community and technical colleges’ Open Course Library simply offers collections of course materials that cost $30 or less for our 81 highest enrolled courses. OCL leverages open educational resources (OER) that can be used, adapted and shared for free as well as low-cost publisher materials.

MERLOT
The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
OASIS
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 80 different sources and contains 331,461 records.
OER Commons
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost, and without needing to ask permission. Includes textbooks and other course materials.

Openverse
Search for free content covered by public domain or Creative Commons licenses (formerly Creative Commons image search)
ccMixter
Music on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons license. You are free to download and sample from music on this site and share the results with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Some songs might have certain restrictions, depending on their specific licenses. Each submission is marked clearly with the license that applies to it.
Freesound
Freesound aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, and all sorts of bleeps, ... released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse.
Google Image Search
Google Image Search allows you to limit for either Creative Commons or commercial materials.
Flickr
Flickr offers multiple search options that allow users to narrow by kinds of Creative Commons license.

Public Domain Image Resources
Wikipedia maintains a page of online resources for finding public domain images and other content online. While not all of the sites include exclusively public domain images, this list is a good place to start looking for content, particularly if you are looking for more specialized items.
British Library on Flickr
This is a collection of public domain resources from the British Library's collection. The albums included on this page are a great resource for inspiration and reuse.
US Dept of Agriculture Image Gallery
The United States Department of Agriculture maintains a database of images pertaining to their work and areas of purview. Because the images were mostly taken for the government, virtually all are in the public domain. Any images that are not in the public domain are marked as such.
Choral Public Domain Library
This section of the ChoralWiki provides access to public domain music. While much of the site is devoted to scores, it also includes some audio files.
Digital History
This resource from the University of Texas, the University of Houston and the University of Hawaii provides access to historical music that their research has indicated is in the public domain.

Subject Specific OERs

Each librarian lists up-to-date subject specific OERs in each library subject guide. You can find more OERs related to your subject through the following steps.

1. Visit our list of subject guides

You can find the library's list of subject guides in several ways. First, you can visit our subject guides or select the list of guides at the end of this tutorial. Alternatively, you can visit the Wolfgram Memorial Library's website. Then, scroll down until you find the "Additional Resources & Research Tools" boxes. The Subject Guides box is at the right hand side of the top row as shown below.

2. Select or search your subject

Many subjects have several guides related to the subject matter. Select the subject that most closely resembles what you are looking for or use the subject bar at the top of the page. Once you have found your subject, select a guide of interest.

3. Visit the OER tab of the guide

Each subject guide has several tabs on the left hand side to navigate the guide. The vast majority of library subject guides have a tab dedicated to Open Educational Resources (OER) for that subject. It usually one of the middle or lower tabs as shown below.

4. Browse the list of OERs

You can now find a list of different kinds of OERs for your subject. If you do not see an OER that you feel should be on there or you do not see an OER tab for your subject guide, you can contact the librarian associated with the subject guide. You can find their information on the "Start Here" tab on the left hand side of each guide below the list of tabs.

Wolfgram Memorial Library Subject Guides
A list of all the subject guides available through the Wolfgram Memorial Library website.