LibGuides: Library Resources and Services for Faculty: Open Educational Resources

What are Open Educational Resources?

Why Open Educational Resources Matter from Brendan Walsh on Vimeo.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are "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." (The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation).

Library faculty can help you find OER for your classes to help keep your students' textbook costs down. If you are in need of finding an OER for your class, contact us at librarian@rtc.edu.

For more information on OER and for ideas on where to find materials for your class, check out our LibGuide!

Find OER: Select Open Textbook Collections

Open textbooks are free, online learning materials with Creative Commons licenses. Many of the collections will have links to the same books, but each will have a particular focus, and items you can't find in other collections.

Openstax College
Initiated by Rice University, their free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed to ensure they meet the scope and sequence requirements of college courses.
Open Textbook Library
Created by the University of Minnesota to support development of high-quality open textbooks in various subjects.
OER Commons
Provides college-level open textbooks from higher education institutions around the world.
Saylor Academy
Collection of freely available open textbooks for download, online reading, and sharing.
MERLOT Open Textbook
Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) is a curated resource of free and online textbooks for use in teaching and learning.
BC Campus OpenEd
Open textbooks for the 40 highest enrolled first- and second-year subject areas in the British Columbia's public, post-secondary system.
OpenTextbookStore
A free collection of mathematics-related open textbooks. Includes supplements and a link to order print copies of the book.
Textbook Equity
Creator, publisher, distributor, and seller of open textbooks and ancillary materials to college-level students.
State University of New York (SUNY) Open Textbooks
With the initiative of the SUNY Libraries, Open SUNY Textbooks publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed textbooks for use in higher education.
Global Text Project
Joint venture between the University of Georgia and University of Denver business schools. Provides a free library of thousands of texts on various topics.