Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes.
Open Education "...is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge."
—The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
"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. Unlike copyrighted resources, OER have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights."
The Open Education movement is built around the 5Rs of Open
Source:
https://www.oercommons.org/about and https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221.
Affordability - All students have access to the required class materials for no cost or low cost (printing copies)
Accessibility - All students have access to the required class materials before, during, and after the class
Academic Freedom / Copyright - All faculty can edit the course materials as needed
Quality - High quality course materials
Copyright - Compliant
Details from Cable Green, Director of Open Education at Creative Commons, on which Creative Commons licenses work well with OERs.
Source: https://www.yearofopen.org/article/week-2-how-to-decide-which-open-licenses-to-use-on-your-work-who-is-using-open-licensing-international-examples/t
A 2023 collaboration between the Academic Libraries of Indiana's Affordable Learning Committee and the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana's PALSave Team mapped the current courses listed in the Indiana Core Transfer Library to appropriate OER. A searchable table of their map of course to suggested OER can be found here.
The Indiana Core Transfer Library is a comprehensive, continually updated list of courses that are pre-approved for transfer between all Indiana public colleges and university campuses and five independent colleges and universities (assuming adequate grades were earned).
ASEE ELD Open Textbooks for Engineering - This listing of open textbooks is organized by engineering discipline and, in some cases, by subdiscipline. The resource is expected to be updated by the American Society for Engineering Education's Engineering Libraries Division multiple times per year.
BCcampus OpenEd - Engineering - Open textbooks on many subjects, including biological / physical sciences, computer science, engineering, humanities, and math / statistics.
Book Boon - Free textbooks written by professors from the world’s top universities, covering topics from Engineering and IT to Economics and Business.
Directory of Open Access Books - The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact.
LibreTexts - From the University of California, Davis, OERs from multiple institutions on biology, business, chemistry, engineering, espanol, geosciences, mathematics, medicine, physics, social sciences, and statistics.
Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) - From George Mason University, simultaneously searches across 20+ different sources of open educational materials.
MDPI Books - Open access books across all disciplines and enables free and unlimited access to the full-text of all scholarly content published. Additionally, print copies are available for purchase.
MERLOT - Engineering Materials - Open assignments, learning objects, animations, videos, textbooks, and other course materials in all engineering subject areas.
MIT OpenCourseWare - Engineering - Open courseware from MIT on all aspects of engineering.
OER Commons - Engineering - OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources, including full university courses, interactive mini-lessons and simulations, adaptations of existing open work, open textbooks, and K-12 lesson plans, worksheets, and activities.
Open Access Directory - The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a list of open access resources.
Open Michigan - Engineering - From the University of Michigan, open courses in introductory engineering and physics topics.
Open Textbook Library - Engineering and Technology - From the University of Minnesota, open textbooks in computer science, engineering and technology, humanities, math, natural sciences, etc.
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) - OASIS is a search tool that makes the discovery of open content easier by searching nearly 100 open sources at one time.
OpenStax - OpenStax publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print. Statistics show that OpenStax textbooks are used in over half of U.S. colleges and universities. This list of peer-reviewed, openly licensed, and 100% free textbooks can be found at https://openstax.org/subjects. OpenStax is sponsored by Rice University.
Pixabay - High quality free images
Saylor Foundation - Build new skills or work toward a degree at your own pace with
free Saylor Academy college courses.
Teaching Commons - Engineering - Open educational resources on engineering including textbooks, course sites, syllabi, lectures, and other course materials.