Open Educational Resources
Open Education Resources Overview
The range of Open Educational Resources is growing and can be unwieldy to navigate. This site, with the 5R's of Open Educational Resources is an excellent guide and overview.
The logo above is UNESCO's icon for Open Education Resources.
Open Access textbooks
InTech Open Access Books
InTechOpen has 2,858 Open Access books published, which is the world’s largest Open Access book collection.
This number translates to more than 40,000 chapters - openly available worldwide for other researchers to read, download, share, reuse and serve as inspiration for new, potentially groundbreaking discoveries.
Affordable Learning Georgia
Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) is:
A University System of Georgia (USG) initiative to promote student success by providing affordable textbook alternatives
A one-stop service to help USG faculty and staff identify lower-cost, electronic, free, and open educational resources (OER), building on the cost-effective subscription resources provided by GALILEO and the USG libraries
A California State University-MERLOT partner benefit service
OPEN STAX
About Us
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 has since scaled to more than 25 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.
Textbook Affordability Project
The purpose of the Textbook Affordability Project (TAP) is to promote awareness of and access to textbook affordability issues and provide solutions to make course materials available that are up-to-date, satisfy academic needs, and are affordable to students.In the 2012-2013 school year, students at four-year public colleges like the University of South Florida spent an average of $1,200 on textbooks, according to collegeboard.com. College textbook prices are at an all-time high and are being driven by an unchallenged market with an imbalance of power held by the textbook publishers. Five textbook publishers are responsible for 80% of the textbooks within the $8 billion publishing industry. When there is limited competition, the publishers can charge whatever they want at the expense of students and their families. In addition, publishers issue new editions every year or two, even with minor changes, thus eradicating the more affordable used textbook market.
Open Access Textbook Websites: FIPSE Grant Project
The Florida Distance Learning Consortium is a network of all public (39) post secondary institutions in Florida that serve 1.3 million postsecondary students annually. This legislatively funded entity supports all institutions in their delivery of technology mediated learning through quarterly meetings, web services and resources including an online catalog of distance learning courses at www.distancelearn.org and an emerging storehouse of learning content and open textbooks, The Orange Grove Repository.
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.
The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.
Introduction to Criminal Law
Introduction to Criminal Law
v. 1.0
If you would like to use this book offline, you may download a copy of the full book as a PDF (112 MB, suitable for printing or most e-readers), or a .zip file containing these HTML files (for use in a web browser offline). Individual chapter PDFs are available below.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 59,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education.
Open Source Options to Support Teaching
MERLOT
MERLOT is a community of staff, volunteers, and members who work together in various ways to provide users of OER (Open Educational Resource) teaching and learning materials with a wealth of services and functions that can enhance their instructional experience. You can learn more about the community by clicking on the links below.
Open Adoption Impact Explorer
This interactive tool lets users adjust a range of Institutional Settings to match their local context and estimate what the impact of adopting OER would be on their students and campus. Users can also tinker with a group of Research-based Settings to make the estimates more conservative or more aggressive.
The goal of the Explorer is to provide OER advocates with rigorously modeled, data-based arguments that they can use in conversations with a wide range of stakeholders (faculty, administration, students, policy makers, etc.).
Creative Commons
Creative Commons helps you legally share your knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world. We unlock the full potential of the internet to drive a new era of development, growth and productivity.
Open Access Repositories/Libraries
National Science Digital Library
Who We Are and What We Do
The National Science Digital Library provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines—both formal and informal, institutional and individual, in local, state, national, and international educational settings. The NSDL collection contains structured descriptive information (metadata) about web-based educational resources held on other sites by their providers. These providers have contribute this metadata to NSDL for organized search and open access to educational resources via this website and its services.
Most resources in the library adhere to principles of Open Educational Resource (OER) access, although some resources are restricted to provider site membership, or may have a cost associated with them (indicated in the full record of the resource).
Directory of Open Access Repositories
OpenDOAR provides a quality-assured listing of open access repositories around the world. OpenDOAR staff harvest and assign metadata to allow categorisation and analysis to assist the wider use and exploitation of repositories. Each of the repositories has been visited by OpenDOAR staff to ensure a high degree of quality and consistency in the information provided: OpenDOAR is maintained by SHERPA Services, based at the Centre for Research Communications at the University of Nottingham.
Introduction to the service
By 2003, a multiplicity of Open Access research archives had grown up around the world, mushrooming in response to calls by scholars, researchers and open access advocates to provide open access to research information. There were then a number of different lists of repositories and open access archives, but no single comprehensive or authoritative list which recorded the range of academic open access repositories.
OER Commons
The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education. The Open Education Movement is not just about cost savings and easy access to openly licensed content; it’s about participation and co-creation. Open Educational Resources (OER) offer opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning content through engaging educators in new participatory processes and effective technologies for engaging with learning.
The Orange Grove: Florida’s Educational Open Resource Repository
We exist to empower all of Florida's 20,000,000 residents to earn a college degree and find a bright career. Whether you're in high school just starting to think about college or you're already working and ready to earn or complete your degree, FloridaShines can help. We've got the resources and support you need.
FloridaShines works with the state's 40 colleges and universities and other partners to help you succeed in school and beyond. Check your transcript. Register for an online course. Search libraries across the state. And a whole lot more. All designed to help you shine.
FloridaShines - Florida's Student Hub of Innovative Educational Services - is a service of the Florida Virtual Campus.
Hathi Trust Full-Text Open Limited
HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
Open Educational Resources-African Virtual Library
African Virtual University (AVU) is a Pan African Intergovernmental Organization whose aim is to significantly increase access to quality higher education and training through the innovative use of Information and Communication Technologies.
Founded in 1997, AVU has graduated 43,000 students across Africa and established the largest network of Open Distance and eLearning institutions in over 30 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. AVU works across borders and languages in Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa.
Digital Commons Network TM
The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.
Open Source Subject Area Databases
Open Source Business Resources
Open Culture
Open CultureFree ebooks, online courses, audio books, movies, and podcasts
