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Open Educational Resources Guide Ask Us

Guide Sections

Intro

The Open Education movement is an international effort to tear down boundaries to educational resources. Open educational resources (OER) are openly-licensed text, media, or other digital assets used for teaching, learning, and research. OER are typically free for users to use, modify, or distribute. Increasingly provincial or federal funding has facilitated the creation of supportive infrastructure for the creation of OER, and there are a number of non-profit platforms that host OER. This guide is intended to help instructors find OER alternatives for the subjects they teach. This list is by no means exhaustive but should serve as a starting point for those curious about incorporating OER into their classes.

Getting Started

Where to find OER

There are a number of collections of open textbooks and other resources that can be adopted and adapted to use in your course.

The resources listed below are just a small sample of the many platforms hosting openly-licensed content, many, many others exist! If you are unable to find openly licensed resources that meet your needs, please reach out for support.

Interdisciplinary

  • ECampusOntario Open Textbook Library - collection of 180 open textbooks and resources, many of which have been reviewed and vetted by educators
  • Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota) - a large collection of openly-licensed, peer-reviewed textbooks in all subject areas
  • OpenStax (Rice University) - peer-reviewed open textbooks in science, math, business, and the social sciences
  • LibreTexts (UC Davis) - open textbooks built by faculty, students, and outside experts
  • Directory of Open Access Books - aggregator of open access books in a wide reange of subject areas

Science and Engineering

  • Biointeractive (Howard Hughes Medical Institute): resources (activities, case students, media) that focus on core concepts and processes in biology, with interdisciplinary resources that connect to environmental science, chemistry, and math and statistics.
  • ChemCollective (Carnegie Mellon): virtual labs, scenario-based learning activities, tutorials, and concept tests.
  • Science Forward (Macaulay Honors College): videos, activities, data sets, and lessons that focus on building critical thinking across the scientific disciplines.
  • OpenCourseware (TU Delft): courseware in Engineering and Applied Sciences that include lectures, exercises, readings, and other materials.
  • EngineerTech: simulations on various topics in engineering technology.

Business and Economics

  • LearningEdge Cases (MIT): case studies touching on areas such as strategy, sustainability, operations management and more.

Social Sciences and Humanities

OER Collections/Repositories

Versluis, Ali. β€œOpen Educational Resources.” University of Guelph Library, 2020, www.lib.uoguelph.ca/using-library/faculty-instructors/open-educational-resources.

Subject Specialties:
open access, digital publishing/scholarship, open scholarly infrastructure, persistent identifiers, scholarly profiles, research data management


Last modified on March 19, 2024 07:04