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OER & Alternative Resources: Open Education Resources

Open Education Resources

OER image

Source: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA

Open Education Resources (OERs) are teaching and learning materials placed on the Internet for public use.  OERs can be:

Learning Objects, Textbooks, Videos, College Courses

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OER Repositories

  • CCCOER The Community College Consortium for OER pulls together finding aids by format (textbook vs courseware, for example) in addition to providing instruction on how to search for OER.
  • OER Commons The OER Commons is a single search source that pulls from multiple OER collections, including MERLOT and Connexions. It is a great first step in an OER search, but often more results can be found by searching the specific collection.
  • Lumen Learning Use these high-quality OERs as-is or modify them to fit your course and students’ needs.
  • MERLOT MERLOT is a collection of online resources curated by a community of faculty, staff, and students of higher education.
  • TED Talks TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less).
  • KhanAcademy Videos Offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard. Sign up for a free account to fully browse the site.
  • Digital Public Library of America Collections of materials from America’s libraries, archives, and museums. The copyright status of items in the DPLA varies. Many items are in the public domain. For individual rights information, please check the Rights field in the metadata or follow the link to the digital object on the content provider’s website for more information.
  • Humanities Commons Discover the latest open-access scholarship and teaching materials.
  • George Mason University Metafinder Searches sixteen targets in real-time, returning the top several hundred or so relevant hits from each site.

Mining OER

mining OER image