Research Guides: OER Faculty Grant: Open Resources

Finding and Evaluating Open Educational Resources

Open Repositories

Merlot 2
MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy.
OER Commons
ISKME created OER Commons, publicly launched in February 2007, to support and build a knowledge base around the use and reuse of open educational resources (OER). As a network for teaching and learning materials, the site offers engagement with resources for curriculum alignment, quality evaluation, social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing.
OER Commons has forged alliances with over 500 major content partners in order to provide a single point of access to the highest quality content from around the world. Users can search across over 42,000 vetted and fully-indexed OER, ensuring a high level of resource relevancy and discovery. Since these resources are 'open,' they are available for educational use, and many hold Creative Commons licenses that allow them to be repurposed, modified and adapted for a diverse array of local contexts.
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 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records.
OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
Mason Metafinder
The Mason OER Metafinder helps you find Open Educational Resources. Unlike other OER discovery sites (e.g, OER Commons, OASIS, MERLOT, OpenStax, etc.) with our Metafinder you aren’t searching a static database that we’ve built. Instead, the OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 21 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button.
Open Textbook Library

Resources in Mathematics

American Institute of Mathematics Open Textbook Initiative
The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) seeks to encourage the adoption of open source and open access mathematics textbooks. The AIM Editorial Board has developed evaluation criteria to identify the books that are suitable for use in traditional university courses. The Editorial Board maintains a list of Approved Textbooks which have been judged to meet these criteria.
Approved Textbooks The list is organized by courses ranging from pre-calculus to upper division analysis and algebra. Each book has a brief description of its important features and information about how to get it.
Evaluation Criteria There are a number of features that the Editorial Board considers in evaluating textbooks.
Guide for Authors Here is some advice on questions facing open textbook authors.
Editorial Board The AIM Editorial Board develops the criteria for acceptance and reviews open textbooks.
Open access curriculum material for inquiry based learning courses can be found at
The Journal for Inquiry Based Learning in Mathematics.
Applied Math and Science Education Repository
AMSER (the Applied Math and Science Education Repository) is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use. AMSER is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the National Science Digital Library, and is being created by a team of project partners led by Internet Scout.
BCCampus Open Textbooks
Open textbooks can be found in the B.C. Open Textbooks Collection, as well as, several other repositories and collections. Some open textbooks contain supplemental or ancillary materials (e.g., test banks, quizzes, PowerPoint slides, videos). Textbooks that include one or more ancillary resources in the B.C. Open Textbooks Collection are marked with an Ancillary Resources flag.
Directory of open access books
Academic peer-reviewed books and chapters from 236 publishers. Winner of the IFLA/Brill Open Access Award 2015.
Imaginary - Open Mathematics
Mathispower4u Tutorials
This site provides more than 6,000 free mini-lessons and example videos with no ads. All of the videos are closed captioned and ADA compliant.
The videos are organized by course and topic.
You can browse the video by course and topic on this site. Just click on the course to the left. The tabs above are now duplicates of the links on the left. To search for a specific video it is recommended to search the Mathispower4u YouTube Channel or the Mathispower4u blog.
MERLOT
MyOpenMath
MyOpenMath is a free, open source, online course management system for mathematics and other quantitative fields. MyOpenMath's primary emphasis is to facilitate the creation and implementation of online homework and assessment, although it also supports content delivery on a limited basis. MyOpenMath runs on the open source IMathAS platform, providing free hosted use of this platform in support of free, open textbooks like the ones listed on OpenTextBookStore.com. The intent is to provide classroom use of the platform, without any required cost to students, for schools wanting a managed install of the IMathAS platform, and to provide students self-study opportunities. MyOpenMath.com is operated by the non-profit organization MyOpenMath.
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 80 different sources and contains 331,461 records.
OER Commons
OER Commons is a dynamic digital library and network. A place to develop and create your own open resources for educational use.
Openstax
OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University, and it’s our mission to improve student access to education. Our first openly licensed college textbook was published in 2012, and our library since scaled to more than 20 books for college and AP courses used by hundreds of thousands of students. Our adaptive learning technology, designed to improve learning outcomes through personalized educational paths, is being piloted in college courses across the country. Through our partnerships with philanthropic foundations and our alliance with other educational resource companies, OpenStax is breaking down the most common barriers to learning and empowering students and instructors to succeed.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization
PhET
Interactive simulations for Science
and Math -
Over 360 million simulations delivered. Developed by the University of Colorado.
PreTeXt
An uncomplicated XML vocabulary for authors of research articles, textbooks, and monographs.
Resources in DocBook, LaTeX, and HTML.
(Before June 2017, PreTeXt was called “MathBook XML”, so many of those references remain.)
Stitz Zeager Open Source Mathematics
Our Current Textbook as of July 2013:
Precalculus, 3rd Corrected Edition free eBook (.pdf)
College Algebra 3rd Corrected Edition, (Chapters 1-9 of Precalculus) free eBook (.pdf)
College Trigonometry 3rd Corrected Edition, (Chapters 10-11 of Precalculus) free eBook (.pdf)
Click to obtain Chapter 0 - Prerequisites - a targeted review (.pdf) (August 2013)
SUNY Open Textbooks
World Digital Library
Makes available free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countires and cultures around the world.
Mason Metafinder

Resources in Criminal Justice

C-Span Video Library: Criminal Justice
CALI - Computer Assisted Legal Instruction
The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, also known as CALI, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit consortium of mostly US law schools that conducts applied research and development in the area of computer-mediated legal education. The organization is best known in law schools for CALI Lessons, online interactive tutorials in legal subjects, and CALI Excellence for the Future Awards (CALI Awards), given to the highest scorer in a law school course at many CALI member law schools. Nearly every US law school is a member of CALI.
CALI was incorporated in 1982 in the state of Minnesota by the University of Minnesota Law School and Harvard Law School.
Mason Metafinder
Merlot II: Criminal Justice Portal
Welcome to the MERLOT Criminal Justice Portal, an educational resource for teaching and learning. Use this portal to discover online learning materials, MERLOT members, journals, professional organizations, and news in your discipline.
MERLOT prides itself on the peer reviews of material in our collection. As a member you can become a peer reviewer. The peer review process for evaluating the teaching and learning resources in MERLOT follows a standard model and is led by Editors and editorial boards. For more information, email beareviewer@merlot.org or visit our Peer Review Information page.
Paul Bowdre, Editor - Criminal Justice Editorial Board
OER Commons
Open Textbook Library
TED: Criminal Justice
A collection of TED Talks (and more) on the topic of Criminal justice.
University of Oxford - Centre forSocio-Legal Studies Podcasts
The Centre for Socio-Legal Studies is an inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary research institute dedicated to the study of law in society. Founded in 1972 at Oxford University, the CSLS is known nationally and internationally for its innovative and original research and publications. It is also widely regarded for its high level training and supervision of students undertaking doctorates and other research degrees. The CSLS is a relatively autonomous institute within the Faculty of Law and has strong links to other departments and institutes in the University of Oxford and beyond.

Open Courses, Courseware, and Repositories

Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.
edX
Free online course ware on numerous academic subjects. ( MOOC)
Khan Academy
Non-profit educational website created in 2006 by Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School to provide " a free world-class education for anyone anywhere". Features micro lectures on numerous academic subjects, and text preparation.
MERLOT
A curated collection of free and opn online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an internal education community,
MIT Open Courseware
Web based publication of vitually all MIT course content. Open Courseware is open and available to the workd and is a permanent MIT activity.
Open Michigan
Open Michigan enables the University of Michigan community to make the products of its research, teaching, and creative work available to the world beyond campus. We are the home for all things open at the University of Michigan—including expertise and services for open educational resources, open data, and open publications.
Open Yale Courses
Provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College course to the public free of charge. Courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.
Saylor.org Academy
Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative working since 2008 to offer free and open online courses to all who want to learn.
SPARC Respository Resource Page

Resources Science Fiction and Fantasy

Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls (emeritus) and Graham Sleight (managing). All the more than 18,000 entries are free to read online; samples appear below. Click here for the Introduction and more on the text; here for Frequently Asked Questions; here for Advice to Students on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more on searching here) or browse the menu categories to the right of the SFE logo.
Internet Speculative Fiction Database
Science Fiction Research Assocation
cience Fiction Research Association
is the oldest professional association dedicated to scholarly inquiry into Science Fiction and the Fantastic across all media.
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer of America
The purpose of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is to promote, advance, and support science fiction and fantasy writing in the United States and elsewhere, by educating and informing the general public and supporting and empowering science fiction and fantasy writers.
We host the prestigious Nebula Awards at our annual SFWA Nebula Conference, assist members in various legal disputes, offer the Speakers Bureau, administer grants to SFF community organizations and members facing medical or legal expenses. More of our programming and services can be found here.
Texas A and M Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database is a freely available online resource designed to help students and researchers locate secondary sources for the study of the science fiction and fantasy and associated genres. These include: historical material; books; articles; news reports; interviews; film reviews; commentary; and fan writing. The database was originally compiled by Hal W. Hall, a librarian at Texas A & M University, and draws and expands upon the Science Fiction and Fantasy Reference Indexes of 1878-1985; 1985-1991; and 1992-1995.

Resources in Film Studies

British Film Institute
Crash Course Series - Film: History Production and Criticism
Project Gutenberg - Movie Bookshelf
Memrise Film
Western Movies: Myth, Ideology, Genre
Listen to Professor Richard Slotkin's final course before retirement, Western Movies: Myths, Ideology, and Genre. Western movies form the oldest of American film genre. They have also been the most important modern vehicles for one of the oldest and most significant of American cultural myths - the myth of the frontier. The course surveys the development of the Western film genre and sets it in historical and cultural context. In addition to viewing 20 or more feature films, we will study some of the precinematic sources of Western themes and images (novels, paintings). There will also be readings in the history of movies, critical and cultural theory, and political history.
Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

Resources in Geology

Laboratory Manual for Introduction to Geology
This textbook is a comprehensive lab manual for the core curriculum Introductory Geosciences classes with both informational content and laboratory exercises. Topics include basic laws and theories in Geology, the Earth's interior and plate tectonics, water and climate change, igneous rocks and volcanoes, and earthquakes.
Accessible files with optical character recognition (OCR) and auto-tagging provided by the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation.
A virtual Laboratory of Geologic History
Created by Valdosta State College:
We developed this site to supplement a laboratory course in Geological History at Valdosta State University. Each location was chosen to represent a specific geologic process. There is no preferred order — start where you wish. (NOTE: so far, only Grandeur Point, West Temple and Boysen are available. The other locations will be open soon.) Each location (Grandeur Point, West Temple, Frenchman, Loop Mountain, Boysen Peak, Palisades, Sawtooth Ridge) is divided into subsections: Geologic Column (an overview of sediment layers), Geologic History (processes of deposition and erosion), Gallery (aerial photos linked to ground photos), and Basic Ideas (elementary processes specific to each location). We have tried to make the navigation so that once inside a location, the user can enter any of the three subsections from anywhere and easily switch among them.
Historical Geology
Overview: Geology can roughly be divided into physical geology, which studies the materials of the Earth and the processes operating in it, and historical geology, which aims at a reconstruction of the history of the Earth. Historical geology requires some knowledge of physical geology for its elucidation. (Imagine, by way of analogy, forensic scientists diagnosing cause of death as a gunshot wound, which is a historical question. It would obviously be necessary for them to know something about the behavior of guns, which would be a physical question.) However, the aim of historical geology is to understand the past, and knowledge of physical geology is merely an adjunct to this aim.

Human Anatomy and Physiology

Visual Human Project
he NLM Visible Human Project has created publicly-available complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of a human male body and a human female body. Specifically, the VHP provides a public-domain library of cross-sectional cryosection, CT, and MRI images obtained from one male cadaver and one female cadaver. The Visible Man data set was publicly released in 1994 and the Visible Woman in 1995.
Anatomy and Physiology Lab Homewokr
These materials are designed to supplement a year-long three-course sequence that uses OpenStax Anatomy and Physiology (https://openstax.org/details/anatomy-and-physiology).
Anatomy Zone
Questions; flashcards;tutorials;3D atlas
Human Body Mps
GetBody Smart
Merlot Human Anatomy and Physiology

OER Faculty Grant

Things to Consider

Finding OERs

How to.......

Assessment and Evaluation Tools

Criteria For Evaluating OER

Audio, Video, and Images

Finding and Evaluating Open Educational Resources

Open Repositories

Resources in Mathematics

Resources in Criminal Justice

Open Courses, Courseware, and Repositories

Resources Science Fiction and Fantasy

Resources in Film Studies

Resources in Geology

Human Anatomy and Physiology