Cowles Library: Open Educational Resources (OER) @ Drake: Find OER

Start here!: OER, Drake-owned textbook alternatives, DRM-free textbooks available for purchase

Faculty Select (EBSCO)
Good place to start looking for OER, Drake-owned textbook alternatives, and more.

Faculty Select is a search tool that allows you to search across:

Multiple OER and OA repositories, including
- Open Education Network (OEN)
- OAPEN
- SUNY Open Textbooks
- BC Open Textbooks
Drake-owned and Open Access content that could be used as a textbook alternative. This includes content from:
- Springer Books
- JSTOR Books
- Oxford Scholarship
- Knowledge Unlatched
- Business Expert Press
- Gale
- OA sources we have access to that are not already part of Faculty Select, like Bloomsbury OA, Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), and JSTOR OA
Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free books/material available for purchase that could be used as textbooks. These sources include EBSCO, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Cambridge University Press eBooks.

**Let us know (via Faculty Select) if you find an eBook you'd like the library to consider licensing in lieu of assigning students to purchase their own textbook individually.

All-in-one Meta searching: Oasis

All-in-one search tool for finding OER. OASIS currently searches open content from 52 different sources and contains 155,375 records.

OASIS includes both OER and Open Access resources. Use the License filter to filter results based on open licenses.

All-in-one Meta searching: Mason

All-in-one search tool for finding OER. Searches many popular OER repositories and referatories such as MERLOT, OER Commons, and the Open Textbook Library.

Find Open Textbooks - Best Bets

Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library provides an easy-to-use interface for locating and evaluating OER. Along with peer-reviewed textbooks, the OTL provides reviews from faculty who have adopted their texts for courses. Hosted by the University of Minnesota.
OpenStax
OpenStax is one of the most popular OER repositories in use today, and provides textbooks for college as well as high school AP courses.These textbooks can easily be adopted "as is" or can be edited to suit the instructors needs. Often include ancillary materials.
Teaching Commons: Open Educational Resources from Leading Colleges and Universities
OER Commons
The Open Educational Resources (OER) Commons currently includes open educational materials in broad subject areas. Materials include lesson plans, textbooks, activities, assessments, readings, and more.
MERLOT
The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
SUNY Open Textbooks Contains openly-licensed, peer-reviewed textbooks from the State University of New York.
eCampus Ontario Open Library
A collection of curated OER. Open textbook records contain: download options, information about the book, links to ancillary materials, links to other editions/versions of the resource, and faculty reviews.
BCCampus OpenEd
The British Columbia Campus Consortium's OER repository, BCCampus OpenEd collects peer-reviewed textbooks from a variety of resources, including the books housed in OpenStax and others.

Additional places to Find Open Textbooks

Lumen Learning
A unique open resource, providing a package of online course materials for many widely-offered college level courses. This is a commercial OER provider that offers free OER, but charges for additional services.
Saylor Academy Bookshelf
Focus is on open textbooks.
LibreTexts
Created by UC Davis with the support of Dept of Education grants, LibreTexts contains open textbooks and other OER in subjects like Chemistry, Biology, Nutrition, Music Theory, Physics, Agriculture, and more!
GALILEO Open Learning Materials
GALILEO Open Learning Materials brings together open educational resources throughout the University System of Georgia, including open textbooks and ancillary materials.
MIT OpenCourseWare
A web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content, OpenCourseWare is open, available globally, and a permanent MIT activity.
WISC Online
Wisc-Online provides learning objects, interactive activities, and other educational resources in various fields. From Veterinary Medicine to Economics and Political Science, it contains a variety of learning objects for students in nearly any discipline.
Skills Commons
A growing repository of materials developed by Federal TAACCCT Grant recipient colleges. Includes these industries: Construction; Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing & Hunting; Educational Services; Health Care & Social Assistance; Administrative & Support Services; Repair & Maintenance; Manufacturing, and others!
Mind of the Universe: Open Source Science TV
The Mind of the Universe is an international tv series and open source digital platform about the rapid evolution of our knowledge. It explores the human destiny and the world of tomorrow through the eyes of great minds from all continents all over the globe in raw footage from interviews with real scholars.
National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science
Case studies are a powerful pedagogical technique for teaching science. Cases can be used not only to teach scientific concepts but also process skills and critical thinking. Since many of the best cases are based on contemporary, and often contentious, science problems that students encounter in the news, the use of cases in the classroom makes science relevant.

Source: "Open Educational Resources (OER): Find Open Textbooks" by Abbey Elder, Iowa State University, and "Search for Open Textbooks & Other OER" by Kate Hess, Kirkwood Community College.

Commercial Platforms that Utilize OER

Commercial Platforms that Utilize Open Educational Resources: A Crowd-Sourced Tool for Sharing Information and Assessing Products by Abbey Elder

Open Educational Resources (OER) @ Drake

Brief (1:31) YouTube video - How to Find OER

Start here!: OER, Drake-owned textbook alternatives, DRM-free textbooks available for purchase

All-in-one Meta searching: Oasis

All-in-one Meta searching: Mason

Find Open Textbooks - Best Bets

Additional places to Find Open Textbooks

Commercial Platforms that Utilize OER

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