OER Collections and Search Engines
There are many more collections of OER available than what we have listed on the main page of this guide. Below are a selection of well-regarded, robust OER collections.
- California Open Educational Resources Council (COERC)The state legislature initiated COERC, with representatives from California's three higher ed systems, to create an online library of open resources and textbooks to provide "high quality, affordable or free materials to save students money."
- Cool 4 EdUniversity of California system, California State University system, and California Community Colleges system "are working together to provide you easy access to quality FREE and OPEN eTextbooks."
- George Mason University OER MetafinderThis aggregated OER search engine by George Mason University searches open book repositories such as Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), HathiTrust, Internet Archive. It also searches OER platforms such as Merlot, OpenStax, and Open Textbook Network.
- MIT Open Courseware Portal for EducatorsOCW Educator helps education professionals navigate the vast library of openly licensed MIT teaching materials available on MIT OpenCourseWare.
- OASISAs per their site, OASIS is "a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 97 different sources and contains 388,610 records."
- OER CommonsOER Commons has a broad range of open educational resources: from peer-reviewed e-textbooks and full university courses to mini-lessons and K-12 lesson plans. It also has an authoring tool.
- OER ConsortiumCommunity College Consortium has numberous OER textbooks for community-college-level courses. Look for the Open Textbook link to textbooks in more than 20 disciplines.
- Open Course LibraryThis collection of open course materials by college faculty and other experts includes syllabi, course activities, readings, and low-cost textbooks ($30 and under). Funded, in part, by the Gates Foundation.
- OpenStax CollegeOpenStax sequence of textbooks "align with standard course curricula." Their peer-reviewed, customizable college texts range from Biology and Statistics to Economics and Psychology, and more. An initiative of Rice University, Hewlett Foundation, Gates Foundation and others.
- Open Textbook LibraryA collaboration among universities such as Purdue and Cal Poly, this site offers peer-reviewed, open college texts from a variety of sources.
- SPARC - OER OverviewSPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is the go-to organization for Scholarly Communication. Their OER pages explain what open educational resources are, how they work, and much more.
- Writing SpacesFor college-level writing studies courses," each volume in the Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing series contains peer-reviewed collections of essays about writing," composed by teachers for students.
Judging the Quality of OER
One concern that is often raised about OER is that of quality. Faculty members are often concerned that openly available resources may be substandard or include unverified information. In order to judge the quality of OER, one can take the following into consideration:
- Who is the author? Is information regarding author and contributors given? Are these individuals active in their fields? Do they hold verified credentials that show they are knowledgable and reliable individuals?
- What is the institutional affiliation of authors or repositories? Is the author of an OER affiliated with a college, university, or organization? Did you discover the OER on a website that is curated by a university or educational organization or institution?
- Has the OER been peer-reviewed? If so, by whom? Some OER collections, such as OpenStax College and MERLOT, provide peer-review to their listed materials. In the case of MERLOT, these are individuals with "Expertise in the scholarship of their field, excellence in teaching, experience in using technology in teaching and learning, and connections to professional organizations in their discipline." Instructors can review any comments or ratings made by peer reviewers to help determine the quality of OER.
- Has the OER been reviewed by community members? If so, by whom? Some OER collections allow for users to provide their own reviews of listed materials. Users may include their names and institutional affiliations. By looking at reviews, you can see what others have to say about the quality and accuracy of OER content.