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Open Educational Resources (OER)

OER Websites and Tools

OC Librarians Can Help You: 

  • Find resources to help you formulate an OER strategy
  • Target specific learning objectives when searching for materials
  • Help you formulate a search strategy to locate OER 
  • Help you explore library resources that support learning objectives
  • Provide copyright guidance and resources

Or, explore OER on your own!

Open Wa OER Resource RepositoryOpen Washington Logo

Most OER organizations or collaborations have a database or central list of resources. Some databases also feature annotations or faculty feedback. Additionally, many disciplines have their own OER websites. Open Washington's Open Educational Resources Network has collected resources by category with the intent of serving all your needs in one place! You’ll find them in the OER Resource Repository. Hover over a resource tile for additional information about the resource. 

OASIS (including Advanced Search)

Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) searches open content from 98 different sources. View OER sources by type—textbooks, courses, interactive simulations, audiobooks, learning objects, and refine your search by the source, license, and whether or not the resource has been reviewed.

Pressbook Directory 

An index of thousands of public books published across dozens of PressbooksEDU networks.

Directory of Open Access Books

36,994 academic peer-reviewed books from 602 publishers.  DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.

Directory of Open Access Journals

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

OER in Canvas Commons

Finding OER in Canvas

Canvas Commons is a learning object repository that enables educators to find, import, and share resources. Finding open educational resources in Canvas Commons is easy:

  1. Log into your Canvas account and click the Commons tab in your sidebar menu.

  2. Search for "OER" and your discipline (i.e., "OER Chemistry").

  3. Review the course shells or course content available. You can use the Filter tab to filter to Undergraduate or Graduate level course materials. 

  4. Once you have identified a course shell or other course content you would like to try, choose your course name from the dropdown menu and hit the Import into Course button. 

  5. If you wish, you can use an "Open Attribution Builder" for your Canvas content. It is located in the drop-down menu under the blue "V" icon ("more external tools") on all the rich content boxes. 

Canvas Commons menu

Resources in the Public Domain

Library of Congress 

Collections of digital books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts. 

British Library

Collections related to History, English, Religious Studies, and other subjects.

Digital Public Library of America

Brings together collections of America’s libraries, archives, and museums.

Europeana

Multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitized items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections.

Google Cultural Institute

A partnership between Google and over 250 museums, archives, and cultural heritage institutions. Collections include more than 40,000 images in high-resolution gigapixel format. 

Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

Over 4000,000 public domain images. Part of the Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) Initiative.

National Archives

All works are in the Public Domain.

National Gallery of Art - NGA Images

Search, browse, share, or download over 43,000 images in the public domain. 

New York Public Library Digital Collections

More than 800,000 digital objects, including drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, and rare books.

Open Culture

"The best free cultural and educational media on the web." Contents include Audiobooks, eBooks, Language sources, Textbooks, MOOCs, Movies, and online courses.

The Public Domain Review

An online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of works from the history of art, literature, and ideas with a focus on works which have now fallen into the public domain.