OER - Open Educational Resources: Find

This guide is designed to help PCC faculty find, create and incorporate open educational resources for classes.

Steps for searching

Guides by Subject
In use by other Oregon instructors: Openoregon.org collects information from Oregon community college instructors about which open/low cost resources they are using for their classes.

Saylor Guides by Subject: OER guides by subject/class created for instructors building open courses. Excellent resource.

PCC Guides by Subject: Google Docs made by PCC librarians in response to requests for help from instructors. Note that these guides may contain useful links, but are no longer being updated. Contact us for more help or to request a new document for your class or subject.

 

Complete Courses
Saylor.org: Offers full courses online. Though they charge students to enroll, they have composed their courses using mostly open materials that can be copied, adapted, etc.

Lumen Learning: Offers complete courses composed of mostly open materials that can be copied and adapted for free. Lumen also offers partnering with institutions to manage and adapt resources for courses at a cost to students. Contact us if you would like to partner with Lumen.

SUNY OER: Ready to adopt full courses. Some overlap with Lumen offerings. 

Open Course Library: This WA project offers 81 of Washington's most enrolled courses. There are a lot of great readings in these course files. Great community college content

Complete Textbooks

LibreTexts: Open textbooks in many subjects with a focus on STEM. Includes Spanish and allied health resources.

Open Textbook Library: Hundreds of complete, open college-level textbooks. Many include peer-reviews.

Open Stax: Affiliated with Rice University. Provides peer reviewed, quality open textbooks.

Large Repositories
OER Commons: Offers a variety of OER at a variety of levels and subjects. Use limiters on left side of results page.
MERLOT: One of the biggest OER repositories, but a bit unwieldy and difficult to search. Use limiting options on the left side of results page.

Library Resources
Consider filling in some of the gaps by using library resources, such as ebooks and articles.

What's next?
Searching for OER can be tricky, but librarians are happy to help! Contact your liaison librarian or Jen Klaudinyi for help searching.
See the "big list" for even more places to look for OER.

Don't forget the ancillaries!

Don't forget to look for ancillary materials as you search for OER to adopt or adapt. Many OER go beyond the textbook and include lesson plans, assignments, study guides, and other materials. These extra materials can be immensely useful and save you a lot of time. 

A few tips:

When searching a repository like OER Commons, use the advanced search features to target ancillary materials. 

For many Open Stax resources, ancillaries are available. Look for headings like "instructor resources," as in this Psychology course:

Search Open Oregon and check the box for resources with ancillaries available: