Open Educational Resources

What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines Open Educational Resources (OER) as:

“learning, teaching, and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, repurpose, adaptation and redistribution by others”  


Where Can I Find OERs?

Looking for help finding or using OERs? Contact Us!

Internet Archive OER A collection of virtual lectures, teaching materials, and open textbooks
MIT OpenCourseWare A web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content
OER Commons A collection of over 50,0000 OER including online courses, textbooks, lesson plans, simulations, and interactive lessons
Open Course Library A collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments
Open Knowledge Repository Created by The World Bank, mostly focussed on Business
University of British Columbia's Open Data Collection UBC Library's Open Collections include digital photos, books, newspapers, maps, videos, theses and more. These publicly-accessible collections are constantly growing and reflect the research interests of the UBC community and beyond

BC Campus OpenEd
Open textbooks for common first and second year subject areas in the British Columbia's public post-secondary system.

eCampus Ontario Open Library
Curated textbooks geared to post-secondary studies in Canada.

Manitoba Open Textbook Initiative
Campus Manitoba and BCcampus have partnered to build a this catalogue of textbooks that have all been created, reviewed, or adapted by faculty at post-secondary institutions in British Columbia.

MERLOT Open Textbook
Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) is a curated resource of free and open textbooks for use in teaching and learning.

Openstax
Founded by Rice University, all textbooks and content is peer-reviewed.

Open Textbook Library
This collection of openly licensed textbooks is from the University of Minnesota.

Directory of Open Access Books
As a discovery service for peer reviewed books published under an Open Access license, DOAB provides a searchable index to the information about these books, with links to the full texts.

Librivox
Librivox's goal is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the Internet.

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks.

Project Gutenberg Canada
Provides access to free eBooks available in the Public Domain in Canada.

BioOne
BioOne Complete is a database of more than 200 subscribed and open-access titles in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences.

BioLine
Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries.

Directory of Open Access JournalsDOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

International Council For Open And Distance Education
The IRRODL is a refereed, open access e-journal that disseminates original research, theory, and best practice in open and distributed learning worldwide.

Public Library of Science (PLoS)
A nonprofit Open Access publisher and advocacy organization with a mission of leading a transformation in scientific and medical research communication.

CC Mixter
An open and free community music remixing site featuring remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses.

Creative Commons Search
Searches websites for images that are creative commons licensed and that can be reused.

Flickr: The Commons
A photo sharing site where institutes such as The Library Of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, and various others can post and share images that have no known copyright restrictions.

Free Music Archive
A library of high-quality, royalty free audio downloads where creators have used Creative Commons licenses.

Library and Archives Canada
Library and Archives Canada preserves and makes accessible the documentary heritage of Canada. Access to resources include publications, archival records, sound and audio-visual materials, photographs, artworks, and electronic documents.

Musopen
Provides public domain recordings, sheet music, and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions.

Mutopia Project
Offering sheet music editions of classical music for free download.

Pexels
A photo and video repository that is free to use and does not require any attribution to the author.

Pixabay
A repository for public domain images. You can freely use any image from this website in digital and printed format, for personal and commercial use.

Public Domain Clip Art
A repository of 25,000+ public domain clip art.

Unsplash
Professional photography images with creative commons zero license.

US Library of Congress
Access to print, pictorial and audio-visual collections and other digital services.

Vimeo & YouTube
Videos with a CC license can be found through Advanced Search options on both of these platforms.

Wikimedia Commons
An online database of freely usable media files with no restrictions.

AMOpen
Association of Municipalities of Ontario open data.

Data.gov
U.S. federal data with links to U.S. states, cities and counties with web sites that provide open data.

EU Open Data Portal
A portal housing a variety of open data across EU policy domains, including the economy, employment, science, environment and education.

Google Public Data Explorer.
Public interest data sets that you can explore using Google's data tools.

Open Data Canada
Government of Canada's open data sets, covering demographic, financial, map data, and more.

Tang, H. (2020). Implementing Open Educational Resources in Digital Education. Educational Technology Research and Development, 69(1).

Shenoda, M. (2020). Evaluation of Open Educational Resources (OER) Use in Construction Management Technology Courses. Journal of Engineering Technology, 37(2).

Kaufman, R. & Campana, A. (2019). OER: Lessons from the Field. Insights the UKSG Journal, 32(1).

Barker, J., Jeffery, K., Jhangiani, R. S., & Veletsianos, G. (2018). Eight patterns of open textbook adoption in British Columbia. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 19(3).

Campus Alberta OER Program Evaluation. March 31, 2017. Campus Alberta Open Educational Resources.

White Paper on Open Educational Resources. November 2017. Ontario Council of University Libraries.

Adopting Open Textbooks. Peer 2 Peer University. This online course is not currently active but all materials (documents, videos) are still available. BCcampus. 2015.

OER Policy Videos. A series of six video interviews with OER leaders. Open Washington: Open Educational Resources Network.

OER Policy Development Tool. Amanda Coolidge, Senior Manager Open Education, BCcampus and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow, and Daniel DeMarte, Chief Academic Officer, Tidewater Community College and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow.

OER: The Champion's Toolkit. Alberta Open Educational Resources.

Policy and Open Education: Less Boring Than You Might Think. November 8, 2018. James Skidmore, University of Waterloo (blog).

The Implementation of Open Educational Resources at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. July 15, 2018. Contact North.


Why Use OER?