1. INTRO
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Guide to Open Educational
Resources (OERs)

2. Section 1
INTRO
What are OERs?
Open educational resources (OER) are digital materials that
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can be re-used for teaching, learning, research and more.
OERs are available for free through open licenses, which
allow uses of the materials that would not be easily
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permitted under copyright alone.
Examples include
• Courses
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• Course materials (lectures, presentations, assignments,
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assessments)
• Videos, podcasts, images
• Articles, journals, books
• Software
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3. Section 1
INTRO
Tips:
Whenever possible grab the embed code. Then, you may integrate the OER
content directly into your online course without having to link the students
elsewhere.
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Utilize the OER Collections listed in the Resources tab. You may also
search for content using your search engine. For instance, Google will
allow you to search for free and open content by toggling “Usage Rights.”
Click here for more information on this subject.
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Other Considerations
•Try to avoid OER “over-usage” and ask yourself what benefit a particular OER
will have for your students.
•Decide how the OER will be used (as the basis for a conference discussion, for
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an assignment, etc.) and provide clear instructions to students for its use.
•Consider how an OER will need to be adapted to meet the particulars of the
class learning objectives.
•Before the start of each new semester be sure to check whether the URL is still
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valid and whether the OER was updated since you last accessed it.

4. Section 1
There are a number of portals into the world of
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OERs…the best of such portals are as follows:
Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching
(MERLOT): http://www.merlot.org/merlot/
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Links to a number of great resources for both learning & teaching across a range
of academic disciplines. Includes guides, videos, images, assignments,
assessments, tutorials, etc.
YouTube EDU: http://www.youtube.com/education
access to a broad set of educational videos that range from academic lectures to
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inspirational speeches and everything in between.
OER Common: http://www.oercommons.org/
Free to use, openly licensed resources from k-12 to college courses
Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org/
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Started by an MIT alum to help teach his cousins via YouTube, it now serves
1800+ courses in mathematics, science, finance, and history.
Connexions http://cnx.org/ an open environment for collaborative
development, free sharing, and publishing scholarly content through
non-linear modules. Anyone may view or contribute materials, adapt
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them, and contribute them back to the Content Commons which is
free to use and reuse under Creative Commons "attribution" license.
See even more on the next page!

5. Section 1
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OER Resources, Continued
NCCC subscribed resources
Atomic Learning
Atomic Learning houses hundreds of tutorials relating to computer
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software and technology.
Click on the following link to view a brief introduction to Atomic
Learning and to learn how you can access this resource through
ANGEL: Introduction to Atomic Learning
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McGraw Hill Campus
Hundreds of e-textbooks and digital resources, including Powerpoint
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presentations, test banks, image libraries, assignments and other valuable
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resources from some of the most trusted textbook publishers in the nation.
Available through ANGEL. Click here for information on accessing and using
this resource.
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6. Section 1
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Open Courses
 MIT Open CourseWare
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Watch the video
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OpenCourseWare,
 OpenCourseWare Consortium
or OCW, is a term
applied to course
 Notre Dame OpenCourseWare
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materials created
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by universities and
 Open.Michigan
shared freely with
the world via the
 Tufts OpenCourseWare
internet.
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 Open Yale Courses
 Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
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7. Section 1
INTRO
Below is a partial list of sites that offer subject-specific OERs:
•AMSER (Applied Math and Science Education Repository)
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•Berklee Shares (Music)
•Chemistry Collective
•DLESE (Digital Library for Earth System Education)
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•Harvard Open Collections Program (History)
•HEAL (Health Education Assets Library)
•iLumina (Science and Mathematics)
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•NEEDS (National Engineering Education Delivery System)
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•Questia (Humanities and Social Sciences)
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8. Section 1
“The cost of course textbooks has long been a source of financial anxiety for
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college students. ….Students of two-year public colleges spend, on average,
$850 a year on textbooks. The cost of the average college textbook increased
186 percent between 1986 and 2004.”
From the Report “Traditional Textbook Alternatives: Considering new solutions
to the affordability challenge “ by Shireen Deboo. Click here to read the full
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report.
Searching for free
Sources for free online textbooks: e-textbooks can be
time-consuming.
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 The Global Text Project Check out these
 Flat World Knowledge resources that
include thousands
 The Orange Grove (books and digital of textbooks that
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objects) are available online
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Search Google Books for free, electronic versions of books. You
May be surprised by how many books are completely or partially
available on this site.
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9. Section 1
Accessibility Tips
OERs can be great resources for ADA compliant material. What to
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look for:
• A stated Accessibility Policy (See Connexions, for example).
Some sites, like MERLOT, allow you to search only for content
that has Accessibility information available (see advanced
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search options).
• Podcasts that are transcribed
Look for a link that provides a text transcription.
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• Videos that are closed captioned
Look for the “closed captioning” symbol.
Many sites, such as Atomic Learning allow you to
search only for closed-captioned videos.
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