OER: Open Educational Resources

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Darren Chase

OER are Open Educational Resources. Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, textbooks, syllabi, lectures, lecture notes, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world.

SBU OER

Academic Commons The SBU Academic Commons is our scholarly open access publishing platform. It includes peer-reviewed articles, scholarly journals, research data and open texts.

Spotlight Resource: Essential Graduate Physics a six-part series of lecture notes and problems by Professor Konstantin K. Likharev.

Faculty interested in contributing OER to the SBU Academic Commons should contact Darren Chase, Head of the Center for Scholarly Communication.

Open Education Guide An extensive guide of resources, tools and information about open education and open education resources.

Open Textbooks

Open SUNY Textbooks Free and open to all institutions. Browse available titles or the SUNY catalog to find suitable learning materials for your courses. Textbooks can be linked, or uploaded into an LMS like Blackboard. Faculty interested in authoring and sharing or adapting a textbook should contact SUNY OER Services.

Openstax College A nonprofit based at Rice University with a mission to improve student access to education. Their first openly licensed college textbook was published in 2012, and their library has since scaled to more than 20 books for college and AP courses used by hundreds of thousands of students.

College Open Textbooks a collective of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges. It is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that support for authors opening their resources, and other services.

MERLOT Open Textbooks MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) is a program of the California State University System. MERLOT Open textbooks include thousands of peer-reviewed titles on a broad range of subjects.

Open Textbook Library Books have been reviewed by faculty from myriad colleges and universities to assess their quality, and books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.

Open Courses & Courseware

Coursera
An education company that partners with the top universities and organizations in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. Our technology enables our partners to teach millions of students rather than hundreds. | About | Courses |

edX
At edX, we believe in the highest quality education, both online and in the classroom. EdX was created for students and institutions that seek to transform themselves through cutting-edge technologies, innovative pedagogy, and rigorous courses. As innovators and experimenters, we want to share what we discover. The edX platform will be available as open source. By conducting and publishing significant research on how students learn, we will empower and inspire educators around the world and promote success in learning. | About | Search | Browse |

Khan Academy
A non-profit educational website created in 2006 by Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School to provide “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” The website features micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare, medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and computer science. | About | Search | Browse |

MERLOT
(Higher Ed focus) The collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder webpages, together with associated comments, and personal collections, all intended to enhance the teaching experience of using a learning material. All of these items have been contributed by volunteer contributors who have either authored the materials themselves, or who have discovered the materials, found them useful, and wished to share their enthusiasm for the materials with others in the teaching and learning community. | About | Search | Courses|

MIT Open Courseware (OCW)
A web-based publication of virtually all Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) course content. Open Courseware is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. Through OCW, educators improve courses and curricula, making their schools more effective while students find additional resources to help them succeed. | Courses | Advanced Search |

Open Learning Initiative
Innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach, with an aim is to create high-quality courses and contribute original research to improve learning and transform higher education.

Open.Michigan
An open education initiative that enables faculty, students, and others to share their educational resources and research with the global learning community.

Open Yale Courses
Provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences. | About | Courses |

OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC)
worldwide community of hundreds of higher education institutions and associated organizations committed to advancing open education and its impact on global education. | About | Courses |