Open Educational Resources (OER)

What is OER?

What are Open Educational Resources?

"OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge."

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

OER Search Engines

VIVA OER Faculty Textbook Portal
Available to TNCC faculty only. The VIVA Faculty Textbook Portal is a catalog to assist Virginia public college and university faculty in finding and selecting open and affordable textbooks for their courses in one place. The Portal is part of a wide-scale Open and Affordable Initiative by VIVA to provide no-cost and barrier-free access to course curriculum resources for students and researchers. The Portal contains over 200,000 titles from VIVA’s shared library collections, open access textbooks, and ebooks available for VIVA to purchase on behalf of public colleges and universities throughout the state.

Once you have found a title you can use for your course, please let us know via the Adoption or Request Purchase links! All VIVA owned content and Open Educational Content is fully accessible through the above link. If you would like to preview the entirety of the ebooks available for VIVA purchase included in the above link, you'll need fuller access to the Textbook Portal. This level of access is available to all VIVA public institution faculty - to receive that link, please contact us at viva@gmu.edu
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 114 different sources and contains 440,250 records.
OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
BC Campus Open Textbooks
BC Campus Open Textbooks offers over 150 textbooks across disciplines that are all openly licensed with Creative Commons licenses. They also offer a guide to authoring and adapting open textbooks.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are real, complete textbooks licensed so teachers and students can freely use, adapt, and distribute the material. Open textbooks can be downloaded for no cost, or printed inexpensively.

This library is a tool to help instructors find affordable, quality textbook solutions. All textbooks in this library are complete and openly licensed.
George Mason OER MetaFinder
The OER Metafinder performs a simultaneous search across 19 different sources of open educational materials. Because it is a real-time, federated search, it can take a bit longer than searches of pre-indexed, curated content; however, as compensation the results returned are absolutely up-to-the-minute for each search target. Additional results will continue to trickle in as the search continues running and you begin examining your results.

Additional Reading for OER Beginners

EDUCAUSE OER Library
Articles, presentations, and more on OERs from EDUCAUSE.
OER Handbook for Educators
"Welcome to the world of Open Educational Resources (OER). This handbook is designed to help educators find, use, develop and share OER to enhance their effectiveness online and in the classroom."
Open Education Consortium
The Open Education Consortium is a great place to start when learning about or searching for OER. It provides a wealth of information as well as some great OER search tools.

How can I get started with OER?

Contact Mary Hanlin your OER librarian for more help with finding or adopting OER!

hanlinm@tncc.edu or 757.825.3878

Learn the basics of open educational resources with Pathways. To sign up for a Pathways workshop click the email me button to the right. In the mean time, take a look at the open texts for Pathways here: https://courses.candelalearning.com/pathways/

Dig a little deeper into copyright and open licensing, the foundation of OER. Try our copyright training module here: https://tncc.libwizard.com/f/Copyright-OER-Module

See how others have done it. Faculty have mapped their course learning outcomes to supporting open materials on the course in the mapping spreadsheets here: https://libguides.tncc.edu/coursemaps

Start looking for OER you can adopt or adapt for your courses. Explore the sources we've listed for open textbooks, open courseware, journals, and other media on this guide!