Ritz Library: OER for DCC: Finding OER

SUNY OER Services

SUNY OER Services provides support services, resources, and professional development to all committed campuses. Email oer@suny.edu with questions or a request for support.

SUNY OER Ready-to-Adopt Courses

Open Textbook Collection

Open textbooks are free, online learning materials with Creative Commons licenses. Many of the collections will have links to the same books, but each will have a particular focus, and items you can't find in other collections.

Openstax College
Initiated by Rice University, their free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed to ensure they meet the scope and sequence requirements of college courses.
State University of New York (SUNY) Open Textbooks
With the initiative of the SUNY Libraries, Open SUNY Textbooks publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed textbooks for use in higher education.
Saylor Academy
Collection of freely available open textbooks for download, online reading, and sharing.
Open Textbook Library
Created by the University of Minnesota to support development of high-quality open textbooks in various subjects.
Textbook Equity
Creator, publisher, distributor, and seller of open textbooks and ancillary materials to college-level students. Free pdf versions.
OpenTextbookStore
A free collection of mathematics-related open textbooks. Includes supplements and a link to order print copies of the book.
BC Campus OpenEd
Open textbooks for the 40 highest enrolled first- and second-year subject areas in the British Columbia's public, post-secondary system.
MERLOT Open Textbook
Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) is a curated resource of free and online textbooks for use in teaching and learning.
OER Commons
Provides college-level open textbooks from higher education institutions around the world.
Open Textbooks -- Community College Consortium

OER Repositories

OER repositories contain more than just open textbooks. All content featured within these pages is free but usage rights vary. Materials in these repositories are released under a Creative Commons license while some are in the public domain.

OASIS
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
MERLOT II
Free, peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials maintained by the California State University System.
OER Commons
Funded by ISKME, OER Commons is a library of OER materials containing over 50,000 high-quality OER.
Openstax CNX (formerly Connexions)
Contains textbooks, articles, supplements, and other learning resources that can be read online or downloaded for free.
Open Course Library
Collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments.
California Open Online Library for Education (Cool4Ed)
Library of free open source textbooks and other materials from the State of California Higher Educations Systems.
Open Education Global
Free and open collection of high-quality learning materials presented in the form of courses.
MIT OpenCourseWare
A web-based publication of materials from thousands of MIT courses. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
AMSER (Applied Math and Science Education Repository)
Portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in community and technical Colleges.
Open Michigan
A hub that helps people find, use, and create openly licensed content and provides a space to share their educational content. through partnerships with community of schools & colleges, campuses, faculty, students and alumni.

Video Playlist on Finding OER

Library eBooks as Textbook Alternative

Library ebooks can also be used as a textbook alternative or as supplemental materials to enhance delivery of your course. Chapters or pages within an eBook can be linked directly in Brightspace for download.

Open Access Journals

Content from Open Access journals are included in Ritz Library's Discovery Search results but are also accessible by those outside the DCC student/faculty/staff community. Here are a few examples and a Directory of Open Access Journals.

Directory of Open Access Journals
Covers free, full-text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. DOAJ journals are included in Ritz Discovery Search results as well.
International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning
The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (www.irrodl.org) is a refereed, open access e-journal that disseminates original research, theory, and best practice in open and distributed learning worldwide.
Critical Questions in Education
Journal of Educators Online

A Note About Images

If you are searching for openly licensed images to use, be forewarned that the Bing "Creative Commons" image search in Microsoft Office applications includes many images which are NOT actually openly licensed. Bing has a disclaimer that you are responsible for reviewing the license and respecting copyright laws. Unfortunately, a lot of educational images are included from Wikispaces pages, and Wikispaces has no inherent safeguards to ensure that content is actually open. If you see a copyright symbol at the bottom of an image, you should look for a different image to use. Similarly, if you can't find any licensing information or attribution for an image, you should look for a different image.

Wikimedia, on the other hand, is a much better source for open images because there are a number of built-in safeguards. License information is included for all the media posted on Wikimedia, and they make it easy to give proper attribution to credit the creators of media content.