Finding & Evaluating OER - OER - Open Educational Resources

Finding OER

OpenStax
Based at Rice University, OpenStax is one of the world’s largest nonprofit digital learning platforms and publisher of free, open education resources.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost.
National Academies Press
The National Academies Press (NAP) publishes the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative, independently-researched information on important matters in science and health policy.
BCcampus
Search for quality open textbooks offered in a variety of digital formats; the first step in adopting open educational resources. Search by subject and download them to your computer.
Directory of Open Access Books
DOAB is a discovery service for peer reviewed open access books and book publishers that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed books.
OER Commons
The tens of thousands of open resources on OER Commons are free - and they will be forever.
IntechOpen
Academic content is accessible for free, on all electronic devices - no matter where its downloaded and read, from Burkina Faso, to Romania or in Silicon Valley.
OAPEN
OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication.

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.
OASIS
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 113 different sources and contains 440,176 records.
Teaching Commons
The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.

MIT OpenCourseWare
OCW makes the materials used in the teaching of MIT's subjects available on the Web.
LibreTexts
The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.
Open Learn from The Open University
Everything on the multi-award winning OpenLearn is free to everyone.

Creative Commons Search
Browse through over 600 million items to reuse
Pixabay
Over 2.5 million+ high quality stock images, videos and music shared by our talented community.
Wikimedia Commons
a collection of 81,295,353 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.
Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (Library of Congress)
The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) contains catalog records and digital images representing a rich cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division and, in some cases, other units of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress offers broad public access to these materials as a contribution to education and scholarship.
Google Advanced Image Search
Use the "Usage Rights" filter to find images with Creative Commons licenses.

Moving Image Archive
This library contains digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download.
Bozeman Science
Hundreds of science videos that have been viewed millions of times by learners around the world. Video essentials for AP Biology, AP Chemistry, AP Environmental Science, and AP Physics 1&2 are aligned to the AP curriculum.

Evaluating OER

In addition to the usual criteria you apply when examining coures materials for use in your courses, OER will require that you consider the following in your evaluation:

Licensing

Is the resource in the public domain?
Does it contain a Creative Commons (or other open) license?
Is it protected under copyright (does not contain an open license)?