LibGuides: OER: No-Cost/Low-Cost Options for Courses: Multidisciplinary OER Textbook Repositories

Where Do I Start?

Interested in adopting an OER textbook? Don't know where to start?

Here are the best options for you:

Ask the FVCC Library Staff to help. There are many repositories of OER and many colleges and universities that host OER. It can be difficult to know where to look. Library Staff have the expertise to search through the options to provide you with a list of potential OER textbooks.
Take a look at a few quality general sites. These are listed in General OER Repositories.
Check your professional organizations for recommended OER resources.

General OER Repositories

Open Textbook Library (highly recommended)
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.

Mason OER Metafinder (highly recommended)
Simultaneously searches several OER repositories.

OER Commons Post-Secondary Textbooks
Curated collections of OER Textbooks and supplementary resources.

Merlot II Open Access Textbooks

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.

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
Links to OER resources.

MIT Open Courseware: Online Textbooks
This webpage is an index to the online textbooks in MIT OpenCourseWare. Each link below goes to a course or resource page that contains the textbook files.

Some of these online textbooks are open-licensed electronic versions of print books. Others are self-published online books, or course notes which are so thorough that they serve as an alternative to a conventional textbook.

WAC Clearinghouse
Free books available, partially sponsored by Colorado State University.

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 117 different sources and contains 388,707 records. OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.

Digital Commons Teaching
OER resources from leading colleges and universities. Can browse by institution, Type of Material, or Subject Area.

Open Learning Initiative
Low cost per student courses which can be integrated into an LMS. Covers a variety of topics.
Open Course Library
Search for courses. Access a full description by clicking on the course title. Get directly to the course contents by clicking Browse.

Oxford Academic

A collection of Open Access and Free Books and Journals produced by Oxford University Press and made available to the public.

Recorded Lectures & Video Tutorials

From Open4Us: Many institutions have recorded on-campus lectures and published them as OER licensed with Creative Commons. Short video tutorials on a particular subject are also available. Searching for recorded lectures or video tutorials?

Open Yale Courses
Open Yale Courses (OYC) provide lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses licensed using Creative Commons. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences. Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.
MIT YouTube Channel
MIT has their own MIT YouTube channel where recorded lectures are uploaded.

MIT is also well known for the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, linked above, a Creative Commons licensed web-based publication of virtually all MIT on campus course content online including lecture notes, exams, and videos.
Webcast Berkeley
UC Berkeley’s webcast.berkeley is a central service for online video and audio lectures. From the home page you can search for a particular course or simply choose to view all courses. Video and audio lectures are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) and made available through YouTube and/or iTunes.