Finding OER Materials

OER is ideal for all courses, particularly if they are online. When building a course online or thinking about what content to use, why start from scratch when you can retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute something else out there on your subject area? There are many ways to find OER materials, but mostly through OER repositories and textbook consortia. Here are some of the major repositories to search through:

• BC OpenEd Campus
• Open Library
• Open Textbook Library
• OpenStax
• LibreText
• UNCG’s OER Subject guide: this is catered open courses, textbooks, and journals created by your OER and subject librarians at UNCG
• More!

Machine Readable PDF of OER by Subject Infographic

Be sure to try different keywords about your subject area and try more than one OER repository. Contacting and working with your academic liaison librarian is also recommended in terms of making sure you are searching all available resources. Librarians can look through research guides on OER and may have access to OER email listservs to ask about available materials. 

The UNCG learning management system (LMS) Canvas also has a repository of learning modules and objects called Canvas Commons that includes licenses that make it clear whether this content is open to reuse and readapt in your course. Check out this “What is Canvas Commons” guide or contact your department instructional technology consultant to find out more about Canvas. 

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