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Open Educational Resources FAQ

This guide is designed to answer some frequently asked questions about Open Educational Resources.

Open textbooks

Searching for OER can be overwhelming. How do you know where to start?

Places to start

These sites include highly curated lists of OER, meaning the quality is likely to be very good. However, it also means there are fewer OER listed. Start here, but if you don’t find what you’re looking for, continue to the next section.

Continuing the search

The sites listed in this section will tend to have more resources than those above, but you may have to do a little more work identifying what will be useful for your course.

Not finding anything?

Some disciplines are better represented than others in the world of OER, but that is changing all the time. If you couldn’t find anything from the sites above, reach out to your librarians! We can help you search.

Open course materials

Many institutions offer entire web-based courses or course supplements packaged together as OpenCourseWare.

Open Access journal articles

Along with open courses and textbooks, there are many research-focused scholarly publications that are open and freely available to the public. Within the field of scholarly journal publishing, this practice is called Open Access (OA). Listed below are some of the most significant and large open access journal collections online.

Attribution

The content on this page is adapted from Suzanne Wakim’s presentation “Finding OER”, shared under a CC BY license, and from USG's tutorial "Finding Free and Open Resources", shared under a CC BY 4.0 license.