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Using Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources (OER) can be used to enhance classroom experiences and reduce the cost of course materials for professors and students. This can be done by adopting the use of Open Books and Textbooks, utilizing freely accessible lectures and works in the public domain, and other Open Course materials. Finding OER for specific course needs can be done by searching through large OER Repositories with works authored by faculty from around the world.
Follow these steps to integrate OER into a course:
OER Sources
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The Mason OER Metafinder, from George Washington University, searches 18 different sources of open educational materials, from OpenStax to the Internet Archive.
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SUNY OASIS searches open content from 73 different sources, including MIT Open Courseware, the Open Textbook Library, and Portland State University.
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The California Open Online Library for Education (Cool4Ed) contains materials from Califoria's Digital Open Source Library, including textbooks, course materials, and journal articles.
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The Internet Archive's Open Educational Resources includes open courses, video lectures and supplemental materials.
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OER Commons is a public library for OER that includes everything from open data sets to full courses across a range of disciplines and grade levels.
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MERLOT is a project of the California State University Center for Distributed Learning. It contains tens of thousands of learning materials, including animations, case studies, textbooks, and presentations.
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The Open Course Library includes syllabi, activities, readings and assessments. All materials are shared under a Creative Commons license, but some materials are paired with low cost textbooks ($30 or under).
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MIT Open Courseware is a web archive of MIT course content. It contains open syllabi and assignments; some, but not all, course readings are also open.
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Course outlines for Open Course creation following the standards of Saylor Academy.
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The Orange Grove repository, is Florida's digital repository for instructional resources. The repository provides an environment for educators to search for, use, remix, share, and contribute educational resources.
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OpenStax contains peer-reviewed, open source textbooks.
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College-level open textbooks collected by the University of Minnesota.
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A curated collection of open textbooks reviewed by British Columbia educators.
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Project Gutenberg contains over 57,000 free eBooks that are in the public domain.
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OAPEN is dedicated to peer-reviewed, open access books. OAPEN is the repository for hosting and disseminating books, and the Directory of Open Access Books is the discovery service for finding OA books.
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Luminos is California Press' Open Access publishing platform for books, following the same standards for selection, review, and production as California Press' traditional imprint.
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Open Textbooks in multiple languages, categorized by subject, completion status, and reading level.
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TED Talks are Creative Commons licensed lectures and talks covering a range of topics.
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Interactive simulations for science and math education, created at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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The Wikimedia Commons contains images, music and video that are openly licensed or in the public domain.
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From the Monterey Institute of Technology and Education, HippoCampus contains a variety of resources aimed at high school and college level users.
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Critical Commons is a public media archive that advocates for the transformative use of media in education.
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This is the Internet Archive's collection of moving images, spanning everything from news broadcasts to full-length films./div>
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Open Culture is a blog compiling open materials ranging from audio books to online courses to full-length movies.
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A large collection of searchable video content organized by genre, collection, color, duration, and sound. The Open Video Project is maintained by the Interaction Design Laboratory at the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Discipline Specific OER
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The Getty Research Institute contains special collections of rare materials and digital resources for teaching and scholarship.
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Lumen Learning now hosts the popular Boundless art history overview.
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PBS's award-winning television series Art in the Twenty-First Century, featuring interviews with many contemporary artists.
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Smarthistory contains videos and essays on art and cultural objects from a range of styles and time periods.
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CommonLit offers free instruction materials supporting literacy development in grades 3-12.
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Curriki has a library of openly licensed standards-aligned materials for K-12 education.
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Share My Lesson is a website created by the American Federation for Teachers that houses over 420,000 lessons for K-12 educators.
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Open course materials for primary and secondary-level teaching
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Edutopia
Edutopia contains videos about evidence- and practioner-based learning strategies in K-12 schools.
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MERLOT also contains K-12 materials, which can be found by selecting the audience level under the Advanced Material Search.
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Textbooks used within MIT OpenCourseWare courses. Links are organized by course and include textbooks, self-published books, and course notes.
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A peer-reviewed open resource for college students in courses that require writing and research.
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Saylor's complete open course on English Composition, also contains a list of open resources used within the course.
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Writing Spaces is an open textbook resource for college-level writing courses.
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MIT's Open Courses on Literature, some of which also contain open course materials for readings.
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COERLL is the University at Texas Austin's repository for open materials on language learning, containing materials for language learning from Arabic to Yoruba.
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Acceso is the University of Kansas Collaborative Digital Spanish Project's open-access learning environment for the learning of Spanish.
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Open text from SUNY Textbooks on the study of literature, with reading guides for many great works.
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Commons Open Repository Exchange (CORE) is a multidisciplinary repository including articles, digital projects, syllabi, and course materials.
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Science Forward provides videos and resources on critical thinking skills across the sciences.
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Chemical Education Digital Library is a collection of digital tools and resources for teaching chemistry, including interactive models and textbooks.
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A collection of open textbooks that have already been evaluated to meet the criteria set by the American Institute of Mathematics.
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Collection of mathematics resources including homework, quizzes and tests.
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Collection on OER Commons curated by the National Science Foundation.
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The Chemistry LibreTexts library is a principal hub of the LibreTexts project, a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop open-access texts to improve postsecondary education.
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Noba, a project of the non-profit Deiner Education Fund, is a free platform for psychology textbooks and educational materials.
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Open textbook from BCcampus Open Education.
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Open textbook created by Regis McCord, a professor at Northwestern Michigan College.
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Sociology textbook that draws connections between sociology concepts and current events, social change, and social policies.
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