Library: Alternative Learning Materials Initiative (ALMI): Resources for Finding OER

Searching for OER

OER come on many different formats and are created by different types of people. The search for OER can be an overwhelming and daunting task. Especially for academic librarians and faculty that have to consider the academic integrity of the course material and pedagogy.

Do not be overwhelmed! First, start by contacting our Electronic & Educational Resources Librarian Chris Hulsman OR fill out the request for information form.

Additionally, consider these important OER details when beginning your search for OER:

What fits your course & your pedagogy is the best choice
There may not always be ideal OER for your course
Remixing and repurposing OER to create course materials can be a long and exhaustive project
When it comes to sharing your course material and your content, we take intellectual property seriously
You are the content expert & you know what's best

SUNY Geneseo OASIS - Openly Available Sources Integrated Search

Creative Commons Search Tool
This search tool allows you to search for Creative Commons content based on the way that you want to use the content. You can search using Flickr, Fotopedia, Google, Google Images, YouTube, and SoundCloud.
The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
The Mason OER Metafinder helps you find Open Educational Resources. Unlike other OER discovery sites (e.g, OER Commons, OASIS, MERLOT, OpenStax, etc.) with our Metafinder you aren’t searching a static database that we’ve built. Instead, the OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button.

Evaluating OER

Finding OER can be a daunting task, especially when there are so many unvetted and unsubstantiated information outlets online. A leading concern of implementing OER is evaluating the quality of the material. Occasionally, there are reviews from other faculty that have used specific OER available to browse. Unfortunately, as content experts, it is typically up to faculty to gage whether an OER is of high-quality. You are not alone however! Here are some aids to help you evaluate OER.

Achieve's OER Evaluation Rubric
The following rubrics represent an evaluation system for objects found within Open Education Resources. An object could include images, applets, lessons, units, assessments and more. For the purpose of this evaluation, any component that can exist as a stand-alone qualifies as an object. The rubrics in this packet can be applied across content areas and object types.
Achieve OER Evaluation Rubrics and Tool Videos
This playlist includes videos about how to apply the OER Evaluation Rubrics and use the online Evaluation Tool. From Achieve.org
BC Campus OpenEd: Faculty Guide for Evaluating Open Educational Resources
With so many freely available resources online, choosing OER can be overwhelming. This checklist contains some suggestions for faculty when choosing resources for use in the classroom.
SUNY ALS How do Evaluate OER
This criteria is summarized from the article The Four R’s of Openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources, http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/822/ and http://opencontent.org

OER Textbook Repositories

Looking for a replacement textbook? These repositories are searchable collections of OER textbooks. The vast majority of these are able to be remixed and repurposed with other material. Please contact a librarian for assistance with editing PDFs.

SUNY Milne Library Open Textbooks
Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Education Network.
OpenStax Textbooks
OpenStax is part of Rice University, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable corporation. As an educational initiative, it's our mission to improve educational access and learning for everyone. Through our partnerships with philanthropic foundations and our alliance with other educational resource companies, we're breaking down the most common barriers to learning. Because we believe that everyone should and can have access to knowledge.
Libre Biology Texts
Welcome to the Biology Library. This Living Library is a principal hub of the LibreTexts project, which is a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts to improve postsecondary education at all levels of higher learning. The LibreTexts approach is highly collaborative where an Open Access textbook environment is under constant revision by students, faculty, and outside experts to supplant conventional paper-based books.
MIT Open Courseware
This page is an index to the online textbooks in MIT OpenCourseWare. Each link below goes to a course or resource page that contains the textbook files. Some of these online textbooks are open-licensed electronic versions of print books. Others are self-published online books, or course notes which are so thorough that they serve as an alternative to a conventional textbook.
Open Textbook Store
OpenTextBookStore was created by educators frustrated with the time involved in finding adoptable open textbooks, with the hope to make open textbook adoption easier for other faculty. Just to be clear, we are not a publisher. This is just a listing site for publicly available open textbooks, maintained by a teacher. Print copies are made available through third party print-on-demand companies. Many of the courses have course packages available through MyOpenMath.com, which provides free online homework for several open math textbooks.
Open Book Publishers (OBP)
Open Book Publishers (OBP), founded in 2008, is a leading independent open access academic press that publishes peer-reviewed, award-winning monographs, edited collections, textbooks, critical translations and more. We are a non-profit social enterprise based in the UK and run by academics and we are committed to making high-quality research available to every reader. All our books are freely available in open access formats (PDF, HTML and XML), as well as high-quality, affordably priced paperbacks, hardbacks, and ebooks. We do not charge our authors to publish with us and they retain full copyright.

Open Courses & Courseware

Search through repositories of open courses and explore open courseware that may fit your course.

SUNY Lumen Learning Ready to Adopt Course Catalog
SUNY System Enters 3-year Partnership with Lumen Learning to Support Innovative Teaching & Learning. System-wide agreement makes evidence-based courseware, technology, and OER support services available at no cost to students. For assistance in implementing Lumen Courseware, or questions, contact a Librarian!
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These courses are available for all SUNY institutions and can be incorporated into your course shell in the LMS
Saylor Academy
Learn new skills, earn credit toward a degree, or advance your career at your own pace. Build your bridge to better anywhere, at any time, with free courses at Saylor Academy.
Open Learning Initiative (OLI) Carnegie Mellon
Many college and universities around the world are using our courses and unique learning platform—and now you can too! You can access course materials at no cost to you and work at your own pace. Our learning platform gives you targeted feedback as you go, which helps you know if you are mastering a topic or if you need more practice.
Open Course Library
A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs making it easy to access, browse and download.
My Open Math
Hosts interactive math problems and activities that can be used as self-study for students, or interactive homework for faculty to include in their course. Courses include Pre, Beginning and Intermediate Algebra, Pre Calculus 1, Calculus 2, and Trigonometry.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. We tackle math, science, computing, history, art history, economics, and more, including K-14 and test preparation (SAT, Praxis, LSAT) content. We focus on skill mastery to help learners establish strong foundations, so there's no limit to what they can learn next!
PhET Interactive Simulations
Founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. PhET sims are based on extensive education research and engage students through an intuitive, game-like environment where students learn through exploration and discovery.

Open Access Repositories (OAR)

Open Access Repositories search for any open access material that can be added or incorporated into course learning materials

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. All of these items have been contributed by the MERLOT member community, who have either authored the materials themselves, or who have discovered the materials, found them useful, and wished to share their enthusiasm for the materials with others in the teaching and learning community.
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All the materials in MERLOT are reviewed for suitability for retention in the collection. Many undergo the more extensive "peer review" for which MERLOT is famous. MERLOT presents annual awards for various categories of materials added to or used in the collection. As described in Material Link Checking and Removal, all material URL's in the collection are reviewed frequently for sustainability.
OER Commons
The tens of thousands of open resources on OER Commons are free - and they will be forever - but building communities to support them, developing new collections, and creating infrastructure to grow the open community isn’t. Grassroots donations from people like you can help us transform teaching and learning.
Open Education Consortium
The Open Education Consortium (OEC) is a non-profit, global, members-based network of open education institutions and organizations. OEC represents its members and provides advocacy and leadership around advancement of open education globally. OEC works with its members to build capacity to find, reuse, create and share Open Educational Resources (OER), develop open policy, create sustainable open education models, and enable international collaboration and innovation. OEC annually coordinates and hosts Open Education Week, the Open Education Global conference, and Open Education Awards for Excellence. Collectively these efforts aim to bring high quality, inclusive education to all learners around the world.

Organizations & Listservs

These organizations provide information on OER and organize listservs, workshops, data collection, and other resources to assist and advnce the knowledge, discovery, and implementation of OER.

SPARC
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education.
Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER)
Are you interested in discussions about open education at community and technical colleges? Sign up here to join CCCOER’s community of practice email group. You will have an opportunity to post questions about OER to the many expert practitioners in this group and also to answer questions in your area of expertise. We also use this group to share many online and some face-to-face meetups focused on open education including our free monthly webinars and advisory meetings. The email group is hosted by GoogleGroups so you can search the archive for past discussion topics.
OER Digest Newsletter
The OER Digest is your bi-weekly newsletter for open education updates, opportunities, and reminders. Subscribe to get it delivered to your inbox every other Thursday.
Cape Town Hall Open Education Declaration
The Cape Town Open Education Declaration is a worldwide effort to promote open educational resources that anyone can use, customize, improve and redistribute without constraint.
UNESCO OER
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.
OER form part of ‘Open Solutions’, alongside Free and Open Source software (FOSS), Open Access (OA), Open Data (OD) and crowdsourcing platforms.
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
Since its support for open educational resources (OER) began in 2002, our foundation’s goal has always been to equalize access to knowledge by making high quality educational materials and opportunities more broadly available. OER – freely licensed, remixable learning resources – offer a promising solution to the perennial challenge of delivering high levels of student learning at lower cost. But OER offer much more than just cost savings. We believe that well-designed, customizable, openly licensed materials can engage students and energize educators in ways that enable more responsive teaching and better learning.