Guides: Faculty Library Services: Open Educational Resources

This page contains a brief introduction to Open Educational Resources. For more information, please see the Open Educational Resources guide.

Introduction to Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources (OER) are free, openly licensed educational resources, including textbooks, videos, tutorials, and more. Users of OER can engage with the content with minimal restrictions based on Creative Commons licensing:

“OERs 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.” UNESCO (2019)

This guide provides an overview of how to search for, find, and evaluate OER; copyright considerations; and specific examples of Open Textbooks for MSVU teaching subjects.

Source: https://en.unesco.org/themes/building-knowledge-societies/oer

AtlanticOER

AtlanticOER is the regional OER initiative for Atlantic Canadian post-secondary institutions. AtlanticOER offers access to the Pressbooks online book publishing software, grant funding to support the creation and adaption of OER, and support for creating OER. For more information on creating a Pressbooks account to create and/or adapt a textbook, please contact Lindsey MacCallum, the Scholarly Publishing Librarian, at lindsey.maccallum@msvu.ca.

Search for OER

There are many OER repositories to search from; a curated list of the most prominent databases is below.

BC Campus Open Textbook Library
Lists open textbooks in a number of subject areas. It also includes a directory of other open textbook sites and a guide to using open textbooks
Catalogue of H5P Content
A database of interactive tutorials, quizzes, timelines, and simulations that can be downloaded and integrated into Moodle.
Directory of Open Access Books
A discovery service that points to Open Access books that can be found elsewhere. It enables you to search the description of the books and to download the books from the publisher's site.
eCampusOntario Open Textbook Library
This repository offers a curated collection of textbooks, many of which have been reviewed and vetted by educators across Canada.
Knowledge Unlatched
Knowledge Unlatched makes scholarly content freely available to everyone by transitioning monographs and journals in a wide variety of disciplines from paywalled to Open Access content.
Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
George Mason University Libraries, in conjunction with Deep Web Technologies, has created an OER Metafinder that searches across several open repositories.
OASIS
SUNY (State Universities of New York) has developed a search tool that currently searches content from many OER different sources
OER Commons
A digital public library and collaboration platform that contains high-quality OERs for all levels of education.
Open Access for European Networks (OAPEN)
The OAPEN Library hosts and disseminates OA peer-reviewed academic books mainly in the areas of the humanities and social sciences.
Open Book Publishers
A not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by academics, Open Book Publishers is the largest independent open access academic publisher of monographs in the UK.
OpenStax
Educational materials organized in small modules and freely available to be customized as you wish. An initiative of Rice University.
Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks. Supported by the Open Textbook Network.
Pressbooks Directory
A global directory of thousands of Open Textbooks published using the Pressbooks platform.