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Instructor Guide to CUE Library Services & Resources

Open Educational Resources

What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials - text documents, audio, visual, multimedia, tests, software, and other learning objects - that are freely and openly available.

What are the benefits of OER?

  • OER are affordable for students, making education more accessible.
  • As OER can incorporate various learning content, such as video and interactive elements, students can benefit from multiple learning styles.
  • As most OER are digital, remote and continued access is available without access codes or expiration dates.
  • OER allow instructors to adapt and update the content as needed, providing a richer teaching experience and learning opportunity.

Integrating OER into teaching

CUE Library has made is easier to integrate OER into teaching by compiling a list of existing resources below.

Search Tips

  1. Search by discipline or subject first.
  2. If searching with keywords, use broader concepts first, and then narrow down using discipline-specific terms or limiters within the platform.
  3. If available, use the "advanced search" function.
  4. Confirm the conditions of use/license/copyright statis of the resource. Some of the suggested repositories include free digital resources that are not necessarily "open" (i.e. under a Creative Commons license or in the public domain) for reuse or modification without permission. Not sure what the copyright status is of a resource you want to use? Ask the Campus Copyright Officer.

The information provided on this page has been adapted from the University of Alberta's Open Educational Resources and Finding OER guides, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

OER Resources

Academic Earth
Links to free, online college courses from the world's top universities.

Applied Math and Science Education Repository (AMSER)
A portal of math and science educational resources and services.

BC Campus OpenEd
A collection of open textbooks hosted by BC Campus, British Columbia's provincial OER initiative.

BC Campus Open Education OER by Discipline Directory

A wide range of OER organized by discipline.

Internet Archive

A non-profit library of millions of free books, movie, software, music, websites, and more.

Khan Academy

Access to practice exercises and instructional videos in math, science, computing, history, art history, economics, and more.

Lumen Learning
Digital materials for courses in business and economics, humanities and languages, mathematics, science, and social science.

Mason EOR Metafinder
An OER dedicated search engine.

MERLOT
Access to curated online learning and support materials, and content creation tools.

Milane Open Textbooks

A catalogue of open, peer-reviewed textbooks.

MIT OpenCourseWare

Access to courses, materials, and teaching resources in a multitude of disciplines.

OASIS
An OER dedicated search engine.

OER Commons

A multidisciplinary OER collection with a variety of resource formats.

Open Course Library
A collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments.

Open Library Ontario

A collection of OER hosted by eCampus Ontario, Ontario's provincial OER initiative.

Open Michigan

A range of open course materials, videos, lectures, and student work from the University of Michigan.

Open Textbook Store

A collection of open textbooks relating to mathematics.

Open Stax
A collection of free K-12 and post-secondary textbooks, course and assessment materials, and instructor resources.

Open Yale Courses

Free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.

Public Domain Core Collection

Access to over 50 titles of public domain works that have been created using Pressbooks, available in online, epub, pdf, and editable formats.

Textbook Equity Open Education

College-level open textbooks with Creative Commons licenses in a number of disciplines.

World Lecture Project

An international archive for academic videos.