Creative Commons
OERs use Creative Commons licenses as a copyright methodology to allow for sharing, redistributing, and mixing. The following description and link explain CC.
All Creative Commons licenses have many important features in common. Every license helps creators — we call them licensors if they use our tools — retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially. Every Creative Commons license also ensures licensors get the credit for their work they deserve. Every Creative Commons license works around the world and lasts as long as applicable copyright lasts (because they are built on copyright). These common features serve as the baseline, on top of which licensors can choose to grant additional permissions when deciding how they want their work to be used.
Creative Commons provides free, easy-to-use copyright licenses to make a simple and standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work.
Free Digital Textbooks
This page contains the URL's to sites referenced in Dian Schaffhauser's June 2016 article in Campus Technology and additional sites that offer Open Educational Resources or Affordable Educational Resources
- A-Z Affordable Learning DatabaseOhioLINK offers this growing list of resources for affordable learning materials to use in the classroom. These materials are both Open Access, Open Educational, and OhioLINK licensed resources that are no cost to Ohio higher education students.
- BCcampus OpenEdCanadian province, British Columbia, created a collection of open textbooks that could be used in the top 40 highest-enrollment subject areas.
- Lumen LearningLinks are offered to the site's own content on Lumen's Candela Learning catalog and well as content developed by other institutions it has worked with on OER initiatives. Content is made available in HTML format which can be accessed through a school's LMS.
- MerlotCalifornia State University System manages a catalog of thousands of resources in science and technology, math and statistics, humanities, and education. Resources other than textbooks are offered here.
- MIT OpenCourseWareMIT provides an online textbook page along with links to the textbook files used in their online courses. This site is useful for course materials not covered by other sources.
- OER CommonsThe nonprofit Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education launched this site to share content from around the world. College level textbooks represent around 600 results and many are listed in other collections in this list.
- Ohio Open Ed CollaborativeFaculty teams from Ohio 2 and 4 year institutions put together full course guides using OER materials for Ohio's high enrollment courses.
- Open CultureThis site lists a meta collection of free textbooks many taken from other sites listed here. Other collections of free online courses, movies, audio books and other forms of education content are listed.
- Open SUNY TextbooksA pilot project of the State Universities of New York libraries. The titles listed are authored by faculty and published by the libraries.
- Open Textbook Initiative - AIMThe American Institute of Mathematics Editorial Board maintains a list of approved OER textbooks suitable for use in university courses. The list is searchable by subject. They also provide guidance to potential authors.
- Open Textbook NetworkThe University of Minnesota supports this site which represents a consortium of higher education institutions who networked to use OER in their programs. The library of textbooks pulls titles from many sources including some in this list.
- OpenStax CollegeRice University launched this site with 13 titles. There are now 46 in subject areas ranging from anatomy to sociology. The parent organization OpenStax CNX provides an open library of learning objects that can be utilized in custom curricula.
- Project GutenbergMost of the contents are public domain books that represent their effort to digitize cultural works.
- Saylor AcademyKnown for its free courses, the organization also make the curriculum from each course available in downloadable textbook form.
- UC Davis STEMWiki HyperlibraryDirected by a chemistry professor at UC Davis, this collaborative project focuses on STEM topics and invites students and professors to develop content and then share it. Items offered: labs, homework and worksheets. Current subjects covered: chemistry, biology, geology, statistics, physics, math and solar.
- WikibooksWikimedia Foundation hosts this site which offers 2,900 textbooks categorized by subject, completion status and reading level. Many of the books can be downloaded as PDF files.
Search tools for OER
Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)