Library: Open Educational Resources Guide: Navigating OER

Navigating OER

This page and subpages available on the left contain links to informational resource guides on the use and implementation of OER as well as to the most popular collections and repositories for free textbooks, courses, and multimedia assets for use in higher education.

OER Search

The George Mason University OER Metafinder allows you to search up to 15 open repositories at the same time.

Please note that this tool searches OER repositories such as OpenStax and Open Textbook Library as well as digital archives such as American Memory (LOC) and Project Gutenberg. The default is to search all repositories, but you can select specific ones to limit your search to course-specific materials.

Resource Guides

The following are guides to open content and educational resources.

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
Links to OER repositories and collections.
Edutopia: OER Resource Roundup
"An educator's guide to open educational resources (OER), including online repositories, curriculum-sharing websites, sources for lesson plans and activities, and open textbooks"
The OER Starter Kit (2019)
The text is broken into five sections: Getting Started, Copyright, Finding OER, Teaching with OER, and Creating OER. Although some chapters contain more advanced content, the starter kit is primarily intended for users who are entirely new to Open Education.
The OER Starter Kit Workbook (2020)
This is a remix of the OER Starter Kit (above) to include worksheets to help instructors practice the skills they need to confidently find, use, or even create OER.
OER@UH
A guide developed by the OER Librarian at UHM. Includes lists of selected open resources by subject and course.
Open at the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Open Education (2020)
This book represents a starting point towards curating and centering marginal voices and non-dominant epistemic stances in open education. It includes the work of 43 diverse authors whose perspectives challenge the dominant hegemony.
Open Pedagogy Approaches: Faculty, Library, and Student Collaborations (2020)
This Pressbooks text provides ideas, practical tips, and inspiration for educators willing to explore the power of open, whether that involves a small innovation or a large-scale initiative.
Open Professionals Education Network
Comprehensive listing of open content sites and OER repositories.
Pedagogies of Care (2020)
Subtitled, Open Resources for Student-Centered & Adaptive Strategies in the New Higher-Ed Landscape, this collection was created
in response to the impact of COVID-19 with the aim to "help facilitate successful teaching and learning in a time of disruption and hardship." Contibutors to the Pedagogies of Care collection are authors in the Teaching & Learning in Higher Education book series from West Virginia University Press.
Pressbooks User Guide
This guide is designed to provide help and how-tos for using Pressbooks features. This is a work in progress. It is meant to be an evolving handbook for how to use Pressbooks. It is hoped that it also will be useful for anyone doing ebook production, explaining how we deal with various styling problems across ebook platforms.
The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) (2018)
The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) is a living repository of collective knowledge, written to equip all those who want to publish open textbooks with the resources they need.
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Representing two years of collaboration, innumerable conversations and exchanges, and a wide range of collective knowledge and experience, the Guide is a book-in-progress and will evolve and grow over time.
Teaching with Digital Tools and Apps (2020)
This text addresses the following questions: How do you find the right technology tools and apps for your practice? How do you ensure the digital tools and apps that you select for use in your classroom will enrich and extend your teaching, provide an accessible learning experience, and protect students' privacy? What should you look for when evaluating the user experience of apps and tools?
Using LaTex in Pressbooks
This 2021 text provides examples of shortcodes for constructing LaTex equations in Pressbooks.
WikiEducator Exemplary Collection of Open eLearning Content Repositories
List of open resource portals, collections, and institutional repositories.