Open and Free Educational Resources (OER) For Teaching & Learning

Open Educational Resources (OER) are open-license materials (freely accessible) that can be used for teaching and learning.

OER can be defined as:

“teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge” [1]

The list includes:

• Open courses
• Open Textbooks and curricula
• Open services and platforms
• Open media materials
• E-books

A list of open educational resources (OER):

• ALT Open Access Repository (Arts, Education, Science, Social Sciences, Math, Humanities, Business) > Different types of resources
• American Institute of Mathematics Open Textbook Initiative (Math) > Open source and open access mathematics textbooks
• BCcampus > Textbooks
• Book Boon (Varies) > Free ebooks and textbooks
• Boundless > Textbooks
• Open Learning Initiative (Carnegie Mellon University) > Online free courses
• College Open Textbooks > Open textbooks
• Cool 4 Ed > Open online library for education
• Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (University of Texas at Austin) > Languages
• Eliademy > A free e-learning platform that allows anybody to create online courses.
• Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE) > retired in June 2015. Other government resources:
  • Kids.gov > Information for Kids, Parents and Teachers
  • EDSITEment: The Best of the Humanities on the Web
  • Education on Science.gov > More than 200 million pages of federal science information
• HarvardX MOOCs > Harvard’s Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• iBerry > information and resources for online learners, researchers, educators
• iMathAS > Math
• The Open University on iTunes U > Various subjects
• Khan Academy > Various subjects
• Library of Congress > public domain works
• Merlot II > Multimedia Education Resources for Learning and Online Teaching
• Merlot X > Free Online Textbooks
• MIT OPEN COURSEWARE > Free and open publication of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum
• North Carolina Learning Object Repository > K-12
• Notre Dame Open Course Ware > NotreDameX
• OER World Map >  documents OER initiatives around the world
• Open Course Library > A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses.
• Open Education Consortium > Resources, tools and practices
• Open Textbook Library > University of Minnesota
• OpenTextBookStore > Math, Statistics, Liberal Arts
• Open Yale Courses > Lectures and course materials
• OpenDOAR > Directory of Open Access Repositories
• Open Stax > Learning materials
• Project Gutenberg > Free ebooks
• Resource Repository > Health sciences
• Saylor Academy> Free online courses
• Teach Astronomy > Astronomy
• Textbook Equity > Free college level textbooks
• Textbook Revolution > Textbooks
• The Learning Exchange > Online digital library
• Wikiversity > Various – Free content
• WikiEducator > open educational resources

REFERENCES

1. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Retrieved 7 February 2017 from http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education-program/open-educational-resources