Subject and Course Guides: Open Educational Resources (OER): A Guide for Instructors: Find OER

OER Treasure Hunt Worksheet

Use this worksheet, created by Abbey Elder at Iowa State University, to help you organize the resources you find and determine which might be best for your course.

OER Search Tool

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 98 different sources.

Where to Find OER

Open textbooks are free, online learning materials with Creative Commons licenses. There's some overlap among the collections linked below, but each has a particular focus and unique items as well.

Open Textbook Library
Collection of openly-licensed textbooks that been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the University of Minnesota Center for Open Education and the Open Education Network.
OpenStax
OpenStax is a nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University that publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print
B.C. Open Textbook
Collection of open textbooks for a variety of subjects and specialties from the B.C. Campus OpenEd. The open textbooks have been reviewed by faculty, meet accessibility requirements, and/or include ancillary materials (quizzes, test banks, slides, videos, etc.).
LibreTexts
A non-commercial open textbook organization initiated at the University of California, Davis. Their collection is used across the nation as primary course textbooks and as supplemental learning resources.
Open SUNY Textbooks
An open-access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. They publish high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.
eCampus Ontario Open Library
Provides educators and learners with access to more than 250 free and openly-licensed educational resources. The library was launched in 2017 in partnership with BCCampus.

OER repositories contain more than open textbooks. Learning materials in these collections include full courses, syllabi, images, presentations, videos, simulations, and many more.

OER Commons
A digital public library and collaboration platform launched by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). OER Commons allows searching by material types, educational or grade levels, and subject disciplines.
MERLOT
The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
Open Course Library
A collection of expertly developed educational materials – including textbooks, syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments – for 81 high-enrollment college courses. This collection was developed by the Washington State Colleges.
Teaching Commons
The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.

The resources linked here include images and photos that can be downloaded for free with limited or no restrictions.

Openverse
Formerly called Creative Commons Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. Aggregates results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution.
The Gender Spectrum Collection
A stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés.
Nappy
Beautiful, high-resolution photos of black and brown people.
Pexels
Provides high quality and completely free stock photos. No attribution required.
Pixabay
Provides royalty free photos and videos. Pictures are shared as part of the public domain with people all over the world.
Unsplash
Millions of free high-resolution images created by the world’s most generous community of photographers.
WOCinTech
Free photos of women of color working in technology.