Following is a comprehensive listing of general Open Educational Resources (OER) sites for open courseware, textbooks, teaching resources, and subject-specific OER.
| Database | Subject | Format | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) | Mathematics | Multiple | open source and open access mathematics textbooks. |
| ANU Press | Business, Law, Information Technology, Mathematics, Engineering, Humanities and Social Sciences | Multiple | Australia’s first open-access university press, published over 800 titles, including monographs, eBooks, journals and conference proceedings, on a broad range of topics including Asia and Pacific studies, Australian politics, humanities, arts, Indigenous studies and science, as well as biographies of key scholarly figures. |
| Applied Math and Science Education Repository (AMSER) | Information Technology, Mathematics | Books | A portal of educational resources and services free for anyone to use. |
| ARTCyclopedia | Art, Humanities and Communication | Multiple | An online search of over 9,00 artists, 2,900 art sites and more than 160,00 fine art links to online museums and image archives. |
| Bandcamp | Multiple | Sound files | Creative Commons licensed music available on Bandcamp. |
| Bartleby.com | Multiple | Multiple | Literature, Reference, and Verse. Use menu to access, not search box. |
| BC Open Textbooks | Education, Medicine, Social Sciences | Books | These textbooks are all openly licensed under a Creative Commons license, offered in various e-book formats free of charge (print on demand available at cost). |
| Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) | Multiple | Multiple | One of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). |
| Bookboon | Business, Human Resource Management, Science, Mathematics | Books | Over 1000 free textbooks on a range of subjects. These books are of varying quality, and may not be suitable for your purposes. |
| College Open textbooks |
Multiple |
Books | Aggregator for open textbooks, providing access links. |
| C-Span | US Government, Humanities and Communication | Multiple | Created by the American Cable Television Industry, provides access to the live gavel-to-gavel proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate without editing, commentary or analysis and with a balanced presentation of points of view. |
| Deviant Art | Humanities and Communication | Multiple | DeviantART is an online community prompting creative works using a range of Creative Commons licences. Licenses allow sharing and re-producing of many of the featured works. |
| Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) | Multiple | Books | Over 4000 peer-reviewed academic books |
| E-Books Directory | Multiple | Books | eBooks Directory provide access to free downloadable eBooks, documents and lecture notes. |
| Europeana | Humanities and Communication, Social Science | Multiple | Large aggregated database of digitised books, music, artworks, and other material from thousands of European archives, libraries and museums. Search results can be filtered to show material which can be freely reused. |
| Free Music Archive | Multiple | Sound files | Free downloads made available under Creative Commons and other licenses. |
| Getty Publications Virtual Library | Art | Books | Free books on a range of subjects including art history and criticism, Asian art, paintings, decorative art and art reference. |
| Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) | Health, Engineering | Multiple | collection of over 22,000 freely available digital materials for health sciences education. |
| HippoCampus | Mathematics, Sciences and Humanities | Videos | Access several collections of OER STEM, English, and History videos |
| In Tech | Humanities and Communication, Social Science, Psychology, Engineering, Information Technology, Mathematics | Books | Read, share and download more than 5,100 peer-reviewed Open Access books |
| Khan Academy | Multiple | Multiple | Free educational videos on a variety of academic subjects. |
| Latest Thinking (open access research videos) | Multiple | Videos | Researchers present short overviews of their recent academic publications. |
| Librivox | Multiple | Sound files | Free public domain audiobooks |
| Maryland Open Source Textbook Initiative | Multiple | Books | M.O.S.T. seeks to support higher education faculty throughout Maryland in finding, adapting, and adopting OER materials to assist students. |
| MedEdPORTAL Publications | Health | Multiple | Peer-reviewed health education teaching and assessment resources. |
| MERLOT II | Multiple | Books | Curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community. |
| MIT Open Courseware | Engineering, Humanities & Communication, Social Science, Information Technology, Education | Multiple | Features materials from over 2,015 MIT courses, including videos, full courses and teaching resources. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. |
| Moving Image Archive | Multiple | Videos | A collection of mostly open-access videos, films, images, animation, and music. |
| NanoHUB | Science and Technology | Multiple | Thousands of nanotechnology resources including animations, data sets, learning modules, presentations, teaching materials, and online classes. |
| National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) | Mathematics | Multiple | Site containing links to a range of Maths resources including online maths help, access to problems and puzzles as well as maths resources and tools. |
| OASIS |
Multiple |
Multiple | Search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 117 different sources and contains 388,707 records. |
| OER Commons | Multiple | Multiple | Range of educational resources from wikis, interactive tutorials, website links and games in the subject areas of Art History and Visual Art. License conditions range for share only to remix and share. |
| Open Clipart | Multiple | Images | Collection of free mages that can be used. |
| Open Course Library | Multiple | Multiple | OCL leverages open educational resources (OER) that can be used, adapted and shared for free, all licensed as CC BY 3.0. |
| Open Stax | Multiple | Multiple | Mostly peer-reviewed modules and collections that can be used separately or organized into textbooks. Includes a link to authoring tool and community created content. |
| Open SUNY Textbooks | Multiple | Books, course materials | Search open textbooks and courses written and curated by State University of New York (SUNY) faculty. |
| Open Textbook Library |
Business, Information Technology, Mathematics, Law, Communiction |
Books | An organization of colleges and universities supporting the growth of open education |
| Open Video Project | Multiple | Videos | A collection of digitized video to study a wide range of problems in the use of such content. |
| PhET Interactive Simulations | Mathematics, Science, Information Technology | Multiple | free interactive math and science simulations. |
| Pixabay | Multiple | Images | Free photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and videos. |
| Project Gutenberg | Multiple | Multiple | Over 30,000 titles in the public domain. |
| Soundcloud | Multiple | Audio | Audio materials that are free to use, reuse and share. |
| South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) | Language, history | Multiple | Free open-access resource for research and teaching. Resources about and from South Asia in English and South Asian languages (13 languages represented). |
| SPARC* | Multiple | Multiple | Connect OER is a platform to share and discover information about OER activities at campuses across North America |
| Springer Link | Multiple | Books | Range of Open Access Books |
| Teaching Commons | Multiple | Multiple | A curated collection of high-quality textbooks, lesson plans, lectures, multimedia, and supplemental course materials from leading colleges and universities. |
| TED Talks | Multiple | Videos | Thousands of free video presentations on a variety of topics. |
| Trove | Multiple | Multiple | An Australian database aggregator and service hosted by the National Library of Australia. Includes digitised newspapers, government gazettes, books, journal articles, pictures, objects and more in a user-friendly search-engine interface. |
| Ubiquity Press | Multiple | Books, Journals |
Ubiquity Press is an open access publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and data. We operate a highly cost-efficient model that makes quality open access publishing affordable for everyone. We also make our platform available to the Ubiquity Partner Network, providing the infrastructure and services to enable university and society presses to run sustainably and successfully. |
| UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982 - 2004 | Multiple | Books | Over 750 free titles from the Univ. of California Press |
| University of Adelaide Press | Multiple | Multiple | Peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes from Adelaide-led research and collaborations across the world. |
| UTS ePress | Multiple | Multiple | Digital, open access scholarly publishing arm of the University of Technology Sydney. It publishes scholarly eJournals and eBooks across a range of academic disciplines, with particular strengths in the humanities, arts and social sciences. |
| Washington 45 | Multiple | Books | Washington 45 provides a list of open, Creative Commons licensed textbooks that can be downloaded or used online. |
| Web Gallery of Art | Art | Multiple | A virtual museum of Western fine arts of the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism and Impressionism periods containing over 38,00 reproductions, as well as artist biographies. |
| Wikibooks | Humanities and Communication | Books | Over 2000 open content textbooks that anyone can edit. Beware of the relevance and suitability of these books for higher education purposes. |
| Wikimedia Commons | Multiple | Images, videos | Over 30 million free or open-licensed images, sounds, and videos. |
| World Digital Library | Humanities and Communication | Multiple | A project by the Library of Congress and UNESCO. Significant primary sources from around the world in a multilingual format |
| Xerte Public E-learning ReposiTory (Xpert) | Multiple | Multiple | JISC funded rapid innovation project (summer 2009) to explore the potential of delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources created and seamlessly published through the open source e-learning development tool called Xerte Online Toolkits. |
Features
Features
Free digital texts compiled by Deakin University
Can be distributed for free, printed at cost price
Modified for local needs and curriculum
Aiming to increase indigenous, multi-cultural and gender-balanced content to make more inclusive, welcoming Australian textbooks
Features:
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. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogs, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.
Features
Knowledge Unlatched has made it possible for anyone in the world with an Internet connection to read books published through the Knowledge Unlatched project for free. A PDF Open Access version of unlatched books is available from OAPEN and HathiTrust if enough pledges are secured immediately after the pledging period ends or upon publication if the title is new. The Open Access version does not not carry DRM restrictions.
All KU titles are discoverable in OAPEN’s Directory of Open Access Books, HathiTrust’s Digital Library and through library discovery tools that include: EBSCO Discovery Service, Summon and Ex Libris. Books are also listed in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).
By building a sustainable market for Open Access books, readers in all markets, including the world’s poorest, can gain the widest possible access to high-quality scholarship.
Features
The La Trobe eBureau eBureau publications are high quality, peer-reviewed, tailored, interactive, multi-media education resources and ebooks produced by LaTrobe academic staff, openly available free of charge from any location, on any device, at any time via the LaTrobe library catalogue, the La Trobe eBureau website, or Google.
Copyright status checks relating to the use and reproduction of images, audio, video, diagrams and text ensures all published third party materials in eBureau resources meet statutory requirements related to Creative Commons licences in an open access environment.
How to search OER Commons (2:36 min) by Openauthor Youtube
Features:
Licensing
Varies from text to text. Check conditions of use for each.
Features:
Licensing:
Features:
Open Textbook Library provides about 100 open textbooks from various disciplines. These textbooks have proven quality and have been already used in classes at a large number of universities and colleges. All textbooks are completely open.
Licensing:
A collection of resources and open textbooks, including some created by RMIT University academics.
Features:
Licensing:
By Anna Chruścik, Kate Kauter, Louisa Windus, and Eliza Whiteside. Fundamentals of Anatomy and Physiology by University of Southern Queensland is an Open Educational Resource licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Evaluating OER
Please keep in mind that freely available resources should be critically evaluated for appropriateness and content.
Ensure you know how to evaluate your sources for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy and Purpose (the CRAAP test) as there are fewer checks and balances in place for freely available resources.
See the Evaluating Sources guide for more information.
The following OER courses were created by CDU.
Interested in using, modifying, or creating an Open Textbook?
If you are a lecturer at CDU and would like more information and support for using, modifying or creating an open textbook for your course, You may also like to:
For all other matters, please contact the CDU Librarian team via email: askthelibrary@cdu.edu.au