Get started by looking at OER by Discipline Resource Guide: Concordia University 2nd edition.
Keep in mind that searching for potentially relevant OER may involve looking through a range of major collections, aggregators, and discipline resource guides.
After finding potentially interesting OER for your project, you may need to find additional media that can be integrated.
BCcampus Open Textbook Collection
BCcampus curates a major collection of over 378 open textbooks available for adoption and adaptation designed for higher education in British Columbia and Canada. The collection includes and has grown beyond the highest-enrolled subject areas in British Columbia.
Funded by the Government of Ontario, this collection features open textbooks and open resources that map to the top enrolled subjects in Ontario.
"AtlanticOER is a service that supports the hosting and creation of open educational resources by educators and students in the Atlantic provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island."
Le Pavillion is a database of digital educational resources, which include OER, for students and staff in higher education.
OER Commons: Created by ISKME (the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education), this is an aggregator of OER from a growing list of content providers, covering a wide range of education levels from K12, colleges/universities, to career/vocational.
MERLOT: Maintained by the California State University System, this collection has over 40,000 OER of all types, including open textbooks, videos, assignments, quizzes, and fully online courses. The content is contributed and used by an international education community. MERLOT has a peer review information and process: Over 20 editorial boards, each run by an editor and includes a group of peer reviewers. Each editor triages each material in their discipline and assigns it to a reviewer in their discipline.
MASON: Based in George Mason University, this tool performs a simultaneous search across different sources of open educational materials. Other than major OER repositories, it also searches sites such as HathiTrust where some OER may be found.
OASIS: Developed by the State University of New York (SUNY) system, OASIS stands for Openly Available Sources Integrated Search, and it searches across many sources with open content.
BCcampus Open Textbook Collection
BCcampus curates a major collection of over 378 open textbooks available for adoption and adaptation designed for higher education in British Columbia and Canada. The collection includes and has grown beyond the highest-enrolled subject areas in British Columbia.
Subject areas: Academic/Career Success, Adult Basic Education, Art and Design, Biological/Physical Sciences, Business, Campus and Community Resources, Communication/Writing, Computer Science, Earth and Ocean Sciences, Education, Engineering, Health and Medical, Hospitality/Tourism, Humanities, Language Learning, Law/Criminal Justice, Math/Stats, Social Sciences, Support Resources, Trades.
Worth noting: Many of these open textbooks fulfill Accessibility criteria; many include supplementary materials (e.g., quizzes, text banks, slides, video, etc.).Support Resources includes guides to Create/Adapt and Use OER as well as additional Directories.
Quality: BCcampus - Review an Open Textbook: A selection process is set up to seek qualified textbook reviewers based on their teaching experience in the subject.
Funded by the Government of Ontario, this collection features open textbooks and open resources that map to the top enrolled subjects in Ontario.
Subject areas: Art & Design, Business and Economy, Engineering, Health Sciences, Humanities, Public Services, Sciences, Social Sciences, Technology, Trades
Worth noting: Some textbooks include links to supplementary resources (e.g., quizzes, text banks, slides, video, etc.). The collection has a growing body of OER in French alongside Open Textbooks for learning Arabic, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and German.
Quality: Some textbooks include reviews that evaluate the books based on comprehensiveness, accuracy, relevance, clarity, consistency, modularity, organization, interface, grammatical and spelling errors.
Rice University promotes open textbooks for high school and college students, focusing on introductory courses for the highest enrolment degree programs in the U.S.
Subject areas: Math, Science, Social Science, Business
Quality: OpenStax FAQ: Open textbooks are written by professional content developers who are experts in their fields. They meet standard scope and sequence requirements and undergo a rigorous peer-review process. A list of contributors will be shown when clicking on each book.
Supported by the University of Minnesota and the Open Textbook Network, this is a growing collection of open textbooks that are affiliated with a higher education institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. Many have been reviewed by faculty from Open Textbook Network member institutions.
Quality: Open Textbook Library FAQs: Reviewers are faculty from a variety of colleges and universities. Around 60% of books in the Open Textbook Library have been reviewed. In addition, most open textbooks are reviewed during production, using systems implemented by the authors and publishers.
Start by taking a look at OER by Discipline Resource Guide: Concordia University.
BCcampus Open Education's OER by Discipline Directory
Wikimedia Commons: Repository of images, sounds, videos, and general media available for reuse. Items in Wikimedia Commons typically have either a Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike license, a free software license, or are in the public domain.
Flickr: Image and video hosting service. Use the advanced search to find images licensed under Creative Commons.
Pixabay: Website for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics, music, sound effects, and video. Items are available for reuse and remixing under the Pixabay license.
Google Images: a popular search engine with reverse image search capabilities and filters. Search for your item, click on the tools tab. Under usage rights, you can limit your results to Creative Commons Licenses. You will need to verify the item description to see what license it has.
Creative Commons Search: find over 500 million images available for reuse.
Unsplash: website for sharing stock photography under the Unsplash license.
Pexels: a provider of stock photography and stock footage under the Pexels licence OR as CC0.
YouTube: Video sharing social media platform. Search for your item > press Filter> under features select Creative Commons. Verify that the video is freely licensed by clicking on the video’s description.
LibriVox: Community-driven audiobook collection featuring readings of public domain texts (poems, short stories, books)
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OER Concordia University Library Guide was developed and redesigned by Rachel Harris. Source. CC BY 4.0. Except where otherwise noted content on this guide is licenced under a Creative Commons 4.0. International licence. Icons by The Noun Project. Special thanks to Chloe Lei for the previous pilot version of the OER pages and Pamela Carson for web-design consultations.
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