Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: How to find and adopt OER.

Locate OER using Faculty Select

Faculty Select includes ebooks available for purchase, as well as Open textbooks from OER providers including Milne Open Textbooks, BC Open Textbooks, Oapen Library, Open Textbook Library, and OpentStax. Faculty select searches these OER databases at once to save time, although there are many more OER databases available. For detailed information on Faculty Select view the Faculty Select tab.

Information on Faculty Select

Locate OER Materials

BCCampus OpenEd Library
home to a growing selection of open textbooks for a variety of subjects and specialties. Discover open textbooks that have been reviewed by faculty, met accessibility requirements, and/or include ancillary materials (quizzes, test banks, slides, videos, etc.).
eCampusOntario HFP Catalog
Uses H5P, an open source plugin, to allow content authors to easily create interactive content for their courses or other instructional projects.
LibreTexts
multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts to improve postsecondary education at all levels of higher learning. The LibreTexts approach is highly collaborative where an Open Access textbook environment is under constant revision by students, faculty, and outside experts to supplant conventional paper-based books.
Milne Open Textbooks
A catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
MIT Open Courseware
MIT OpenCourseWare is an online publication of materials from over 2,500 MIT courses, freely sharing knowledge with learners and educators around the world.
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 114 different sources and contains 440,269 records.
OER Commons
From a single point of access in OER Commons, you can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons' growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER.
OpenStax
OpenStax is part of Rice University, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable corporation. Our mission is to improve educational access and learning for everyone. We do this by publishing openly licensed books, developing and improving research-based courseware, establishing partnerships with educational resource companies, and more.
Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library was started so that faculty could find open textbooks. More technically, the Open Textbook Library is a comprehensive referatory that points to open textbooks by a variety of authors and publishers.
Phet
PhET provides fun, free, interactive, research-based science and mathematics simulations. We extensively test and evaluate each simulation to ensure educational effectiveness. These tests include student interviews and observation of simulation use in classrooms. The simulations are written in Java, Flash or HTML5, and can be run online or downloaded to your computer. All simulations are open source (see our source code). Multiple sponsors support the PhET project, enabling these resources to be free to all students and teachers.
Press Book Directory
Provides an index of 2,848 books published across 105 Pressbooks networks.
QUBES
Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis
The QUBES platform, a BioQUEST project, is a social cyberinfrastructure that provides an open and inclusive virtual space for sharing STEM classroom activities and resources, discussing teaching and the adaptation of educational materials to specific institutional contexts, and working together to develop new ideas and insights that contribute to STEM education reform.
Skills Commons
A free and open online library called SkillsCommons containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development. The $1.9 billion investment by the US Department of Labor produced a comprehensive collection of workforce-related Open Educational Resources (OER) created by over 700 community colleges across the nation. The OER can be found, reused, revised, retained, redistributed and remixed by an individual, institution, and industry for FREE with the proper attribution to the original author of the resources.
Virtual Lab and Science Resource Directory
lists free science resources designed to support remote science education. This directory is updated as new resources are identified. Note that, while all resources in this directory are free, not all are open. Resources that carry Creative Commons or otherwise open licences are clearly labelled.

Evaluate OER

Evaluating OER materials is similar to evaluating traditional textbooks or materials for your course. If you need assistance BCcampus and Achieve provide checklists and rubrics for evaluating the resources you're considering.