LibGuides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Searching for OERs

Tips on finding good OERs

What defines good OERs? How do you judge their provenance? How do you find OER content that will be suitable for your course?

OERs include a range of materials, from textbooks to lecture notes. Here are some tips on find the right OER:

Trust your gut, and your training. Use your knowledge and expertise to judge the accuracy of the content. If you're unsure, fact-check it, or don't use it.
Grammatical and typographical errors might not be an absolute indication of the quality of the content, but it should raise a red flag for further checks.
Does it align with your learning objectives?
OER content should be adaptable. If the license or the file format doesn't allow for modification, the OER creator did not understand that the idea is to adapt and modify content to meet specific teaching objectives and encourage learning. Take a look at the CARE Framework for more on what good OERs look like.
When you find an OER that could be suitable for your own content, look for legitimate authors and institutions. Some OERs encourage peer review.
Use rubrics to help you determine the quality of OERs.

Search for OERs

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 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records.
OER Commons

Internet Archive: OERs
Provided by the Internet Archive library, hundreds of free courses, video lectures, and supplemental materials from universities in the United States and China. Many of these lectures are available for download.
MERLOT
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.
MOM (Mason OER Metafinder)
Real-time federated search for OER content.
NanoHUB
Provides over 1600 open teaching and learning resources: online presentations; course material; learning modules; podcasts; simulation tools. Created by the NSF-funded Network for Computational Nanotechnology.
OER Africa
Open Course Library
Range of manterials including syllabi, course activities, and assessments created by faculty, instructional designers, librarians, other experts. Some of these materials are intended to be paired with textbooks. The materials have undergone testing for accessibility and assessed for quality. Unless otherwise noted, all materials are shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY) license.and are available for download and editing via Google Docs.
OpenEd
Open textbooks.
Open Knowledge Foundation
Working on open knowledge projects, such as Open Economics and Open Shakespeare. Provides infrastructure for open knowledge projects, communities and resources.
Open Learning Initiative
Free online courses and course materials offered by Carnegie Mellon University.
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.
Teaching Commons
A showcase of high-quality open educational resources from leading universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open-access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, lectures, and more.
TESSA (Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa)
A bank of OER, linked to the school curriculum, and designed to support teachers and teacher educators in developing active approaches to learning. The network is co-ordinated by The Open University, UK. Contains links to other Africa-centered OER.
Unglue It
A collection of openly licensed eBooks on a variety of academic and non-academic topics.
WikiEducator
An evolving online community intended for the planning of education projects linked with the development of free content and the development of free content on WikiEducator for free learning.

Himmelsbach, V. (2020, January 2). Tips for Finding Good OER Content for Your Course. Retrieved May 20, 2020, from https://tophat.com/blog/find-good-oer-content-tips/
OER Africa. (n.d.). Retrieved May 20, 2020, from https://www.oerafrica.org/
Pappas, C. (2018, March 12). 7 Tips To Use Open Educational Resources In Online Training. Retrieved May 20, 2020, from https://elearningindustry.com/tips-use-open-educational-resources-online-training

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Tips on finding good OERs

Search for OERs

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