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Open Education Resources

What are OERs?

What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources, or OERs, are freely accessible and openly licensed texts or other digital assets. LCTCS faculty are currently working on creating OER courses to help reduce the financial burden for students by replacing traditional textbooks with quality OERs. This will also help students be better prepared for their courses from Day One, as their resources will be freely available online.

OER Collections

 
  • American Institute of Mathematics
  • Affordable Learning Georgia 
    • A University System of Georgia (USG) initiative to promote student success by providing affordable textbook alternatives
  • BC Campus Open Ed
    • Supported by the British Columbia Ministry of Education and the Hewlett Foundation.
  • California Open Online for Education - Cool4Ed
    • The three State of California Higher Education Systems are working together to provide you easy access to quality FREE and OPEN eTextbooks that everyone and anyone can use for teaching and learning.
  • College Open Textbooks
    • College Open Textbooks provides open textbooks for community  college and lower division university courses.
  • GALILEO Open Learning Material
    • GALILEO Open Learning Materials brings together open educational resources throughout the University System of Georgia, including open textbooks and ancillary materials.
  • George Mason University Libraries OER Metafinder (MOM)
    • MOM searches seventeen targets in real-time, instantly returning the top several hundred or so most relevant hits from each site. Because it is a real-time search, it can take a bit longer than searches of pre-indexed, curated content; however, as compensation the results returned are absolutely up-to-the-minute for each search target.  Additional results will continue to trickle in as the search continues running and you begin examining your results.
  • Global Text Project
    • Created by a group of educators, the books include English and Spanish language titles.
  • John Hopkins Open Coursework
    • A collection of open coursework dedicated to the medical field. 
  • Louisiana Common Course Catalog & OERs
    • Using the Louisiana Statewide Common Course Catalog, LOUIS created and maintains a list of potential open educational resources (OERs) that faculty may choose to adopt in their courses. The Open Textbook Library is the primary source of OER
      content for this project and content from other OER repositories will be included on an ongoing basis.
  • Lumen Learning
    • Provides links to own content as well as content developed by institutions it has worked with, such as Tidewater Community College and Washington State Community and Technical Colleges.
  • Merlot II
    • Managed through the California State University System. Includes textbooks, case studies, assessment tools, online course modules, journal articles, quizzes, simulations and tutorials
  • MetPublications
    • Over fifty years of MET publications on art history. 
  • MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    • Course materials include several types of open resources in engineering, material and nuclear sciences, aeronautics and astronautics as well as other subjects.
  • OAPEN Library
    • Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) Library contains free to access academic books, primarily in the area of humanities and social sciences.
  • Oasis
    • Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 57 different sources and contains 159,459 records.
  • OER Commons
    • OER Commons provides access to quality content from across the globe.  Users have access to search across over 50,000 fully indexed ORE, to provide a high level resources of discovery and relevancy.
  • Open Book Publishers
    • Open Book Publishers publishes academic texts, but also include a free online edition that can be read via their website, downloaded, reused or embedded anywhere.
  • Open Culture
    • Started by a dean at Stanford University, this source contains wide variety of OERs on diverse formats.
  • Open Education Consortium
    • The Open Education Consortium in collaboration with MERLOT offers a search engine for users to access OERs.  Their aim is to provide access to high quality education and training resources.
  • OpenStax College
    • OpenStax College provides students with free textbooks that meet most requirements for courses. 
  • Open SUNY Textbooks
    • Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook initiative created by the State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants.  This initiative publishes high quality, cost effective course resources.
  • Open Textbook Library
    • The Open Textbook Library provides access to open-licensed textbooks. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.
  • The Orange Grove
    • The Orange Grove repository is Florida's digital repository for instructional resources. The repository provides an environment for educators to search for, use, remix, share, and contribute educational resources. The repository can also be integrated with your Learning Management Systems (e.g. Canvas, Blackboard, Desire 2 Learn). Discover, contribute, and import repository resources directly from your LMS.
  • Saylor Academy Open Textbooks
    • Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative working since 2008 to offer free and open online courses to all who want to learn. There are over 100 free open textbooks for students and educators.
  • Skills Commons
    • Free and open digital library of Workforce Training materials  

Louisiana's OER Commons

LOUIS, the Louisiana Library Consortium, provides this OER Commons, a repository of open educational resources aligned with the Louisiana Statewide Common Course Catalog. This repository also facilitates the creation of new OERs by Louisiana educators.

https://louis.oercommons.org/