Finding OER

The websites below are general to specific sources for finding open educational resources (OER). Discipline specific sources are at Biology OER, Chemistry OER, and Physics and Astronomy OER.  Visit Resources for overview of sources for finding OER and other topics, such as creating contents, copyright, and accessibility.

Search Engines and Curated Indexes

The OER oriented search engines typically produce similar results, and results often have duplicates and cross-postings.

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Textbook and Ancillary Resource Portals

Many of the following sites are based on project or grant funding and their collections may be limited. They may also have a platform for authoring, adapting, remixing and changing textbooks and other material types.

  • Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota) includes OER textbooks that have been reviewed for quality by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities
  • Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries. This initiative published high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.
  • Lumen Learning offers individualized learning experiences and creates digital course materials that replace expensive textbooks in high-enrollment college courses and save students millions every term.  Candela (ebooks and curated learning materials-$10/enrolled student (ER) as of 10/19/19), Waymaker ($25/ER), and OHM (Lumen Online Homework Manager $25/ER)
  • Open NYS is a collaboration between CUNY and SUNY to showcase and support the use of Open Educational Resources.
  • OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum. They have the OER Author tool that CUNY customized for OpenEd CUNY .
  • Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative provides dozens of college-level courses, and a platform that enables research and experimentation with any aspect of the learning experience.
  • OpenStax: A nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University. Their mission is to give every student the tools they need to be successful in the classroom
  • CK-12: Provide support primarily for K-12 but also has some free digital College Flexbooks.
  • MyOpenMath is a “free, open source, online course management system for mathematics and other quantitative fields. MyOpenMath’s primary emphasis is to facilitate the creation and implementation of online homework and assessment, although it also supports content delivery on a limited basis. MyOpenMath runs on the open source IMathAS platform, providing free hosted use of this platform in support of free, open textbooks like the ones listed on OpenTextBookStore.com.” MyOpenMath can be integrated into BlackBoard.

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Institutional Repositories

Many academic institutions have online repositories for storing, finding, and downloading works authored by their faculty, students and staff. Not all the works have an open license. At CUNY, works that are OER have been tagged and can be browsed and searched.

  • CUNY Academic Works institutional repository (archives) provides public access to the scholarly and creative work of CUNY.  The Open Educational Resources series collects instructional materials — from textbooks to syllabi — created by the CUNY community.
  • Digital commons Network gives free access to full-text scholarly articles and other research from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide.

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Curated OER LibGuides

There are many curated OER and Open Access (OA) library guides (LibGuides). Below are STEM-related guides curated by librarians within the CUNY colleges.