Open Educational Resources (OER): Instructor Guide

OER Commons is a large repository for Open Educational Resources, including activities, assessments, lecture notes, lesson plans, and more. It is a project of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. Unlike some sources, OER Commons contains material for grade levels from preschool to graduate school and adult education. Not all material is reviewed.

The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support educational research and novel teaching and learning applications. The OSP currently has a corpus of seven million English-language syllabi from over 80 countries.

This OER Metafinder searches OER repositories like OpenStax, OER Commons, MERLOT but also sites like HathiTrust, DPLA, Internet Archive and NYPL Digital Collections where valuable but often overlooked open educational materials may be found.

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is a curated collection of Open Educational Resources, including textbooks. Many books include peer reviews, user reviews, or editor reviews. Users can restrict search results to textbooks only by selecting the appropriate material type. MERLOT is a program of the California State University system.

MIT Open Courseware is a huge open collection of MIT’s course content. Almost all MIT course content is available, with material from 2260 courses across all disciplines available. No means of evaluating content is provided.