Finding OERs, a great way to NOT “re-invent the wheel”!

The recognition, creation and use of Open Educational Resources has grown around the world over the last number of years. What began as a small, idealistic endeavour to share content among educators has grown to be an initiative supported globally and by all levels of government. Educators and students can browse curated “repositories” of re-usable digital content – from complete textbooks, to lessons, interactive quizzes and other assessments. They are “free” for you to adopt and use in your teaching. Often, depending on the license, these open resources can also be adapted, meaning if they don’t quite match your teaching outcomes, you are permitted to make changes.. The range of open resources spans every discipline. You might find a resource someone else has already created work and make it a better fit for your course and then share it back to the repository! Pretty sweet.

Below are a few collections to get you started. There are many more.

For your quest you need to find an open education resource that you could use and provide a citation. Here’s a link to a webpage at Trent University that explains how to cite OERs that are images. If your OER is textual use the style guide for your discipline, i.e. APA or MLA.

BC Open Collection

Hosted by BCcampus, this site is a great resource to “find free, open, and customizable materials by course or subject.”

eCampusOntario Open Library

The eCampusOntario Open Library provides educators and learners with access to more than 1,900 free and openly-licensed educational resources. The library was launched in 2017 in partnership with BCcampus.

OER Commons Curated Collections

ISKME (Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education) created a global OER Commons, a comprehensive, openly accessible digital library for educators at all levels to identify high-quality Open Educational Resources (OER) and collaborate around their use, evaluation, and improvement to address the needs of their classrooms.

Open Stax

OpenStax is the world’s largest publisher of open education resources (OER) and a provider of integrated learning technologies and education research for high school and college. Open Stax is a global nonprofit at Rice University.