Highline College Library: Faculty Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER): OER Content

OER Resources by Discipline

OER by Discipline from Highline College Library
This Google doc, maintained by Deborah Moore and Hara Brook, lists Open Textbooks not on OpenWA and OER resources in alphabetical order by discipline.
Culturally Responsive Educators OER and Open Access Resources
OER and Open Access Resources for Anti-Racist practices and Culturally Responsive Education.
OER Subject Guides
This library guide from Tacoma Community College Library is an excellent resource for OER by discipline.
Finding OER and Public Domain Images
This Google doc includes resources for locating OER and public domain images.
Finding Classes at Highline with Low Cost or OER Textbooks
Instructions on how to search for Highline classes with low cost (under $50) or OER textbooks

Open Washington Hub

Open Washington Hub
This hub is a dedicated repository for OER shared by our system or created through Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC)-sponsored projects.
Open Washington Hub User Manual
This guide will walk you through the basics of using Open Washington Hub including how to join in a working group, submit content, and search for content.

Equity in Open Textbook Content

Can open education make learning equitable?
Diversity and inclusion initiatives and open education go hand-in-hand. Using both to make learning equitable requires intention. Read this article by Symphonie Swift, Feb 14, 2022, and explore three OpenStax webinars on the subject. Free registration to access the videos may be required.

- Equity challenges and making DEI work for you
- Equity in open textbook content
- Respect and equity in digital learning resources

OER Search

OASIS stands for Openly Available Sources Integrated Search is a search tool for open educational resources (OER). It is there to make find resources easier and simpler.

Creating and Sharing Content

Book Sprints
A Book Sprint is a collaborative process where a book is produced from the ground up in just five days. But even more important, this collaborative process captures the knowledge of a group of subject-matter experts in a manner that would be nearly impossible using traditional methods. The result at the end of the Book Sprint is a high-quality finished book in digital and print-ready formats, ready for distribution.
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Book Sprints, Ltd, is a team of facilitators, book-production professionals, and illustrators specialized in Book Sprint facilitation and rapid book production. Our organization developed the original methodology and has refined it since 2008 through the facilitation of more than 100 Book Sprints. Topics have ranged from corporate documentation to industry guides, government policies, technical documentation, white papers, academic research papers, and activist manuals.
If you would like us to facilitate your Book Sprint please email Mark Brokering at markbrokering@booksprints.net
Canvas Commons
Log into canvas first. Click on Commons in the banner menu next to Calendar. Search or browse for materials with open licenses.
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (OER)
Our mission is to expand access to education by promoting awareness and adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER). Over 250 colleges have joined us and many more participate in our activities and use resources on the website.
EquatIO - Math made digital Chrome extension
Easily create mathematical equations, formulas and quizzes. Intuitively type or hand-write, with no tricky math code to learn. (Use your HC credentials to log into Chrome to add the extension.)
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EquatIO instantly turns your thoughts into clear, accurate on-screen formulas. When you type ‘sq’, it knows that you mean ‘square root’. And it listens, too. When you dictate a formula aloud, EquatIO is smart enough to ignore ‘umms’, ‘errs’ and other unwanted non-math words.
H5P - Create and Share Rich Content
Create, share, modify, and reuse interactive HTML5 content in your browser.
InTech
InTech is a pioneer and world's largest multidisciplinary open access publisher of books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine.
OER Commons
A network for teaching and learning materials, complete with resources for curriculum alignment, quality evaluation, social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing.
OpenStax
View and share free educational material in small modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports or other academic assignments.

Open Access Courseware

Academic Earth
Curated collection of free online courses from the world's top universities.
CK12
STEM Content (mostly K12)
Hippo Campus
Multimedia content--videos, animations, and simulations--for various general education courses. For K12 and college.
Khan Academy
Contains practice exercises, instructional videos, dashboard analytics and other teacher tools.
MIT Open Courseware
Virtually all MIT course content. While this university site is known for its open courses, it also includes an online textbook page with links to the textbook files used in the courses. It's especially useful for finding course materials in areas where OER is sparse: civil, electrical, environmental and mechanical engineering; material and nuclear sciences; and aeronautics and astronautics, among other subjects.
Open Course Library
A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs making it easy to access, browse and download.
Open Yale Courses
provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.
PHET
Free online physics, chemistry, biology, earth science and math simulations. Available in multiple languages.
Smart History
High-quality introductory art history content. Multi-media and articles.

How to Author Your Own OER

Free Publishing Resources

Creative Commons
Find content you can share, use and remix. Remember to check that resources have a creative commons license.
Google Drive
Access Google Drive with a free Google account and use their platform to create and save various document types.
Pressbooks
Pressbooks is book production made simple. Create quality open textbooks, ebooks, print books, and more.
Scalar
Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required.

Low-Cost Publishing Resources

Lumen Learning
Overseen by influential OER activist David Wiley, Lumen's Candela Learning catalog offers links to its own content as well as the content developed by institutions it has worked with on OER initiatives, such as Tidewater Community College and Washington State Community and Technical Colleges. The content isn't technically downloaded as a file; it's made available in HTML format, which can be accessed through a school's learning management system.
Confluence Courseware
The Confluence Courseware process "includes aggregating content at a lower than industry cost by using course creators’ original works of authorship, works in the public domain, and freely licensed Open Educational Resources (OER) available for commercial use. The intention is to provide great books curriculum through advanced technological means to any school or student that desires it."

Highline College Resources

Print on Demand Resources

Lulu
Educators can use Lulu.com to "[e]asily publish textbooks, course materials, and research."
Montezuma Publishing
Montezuma Publishing works to "provide colleges and students with an affordable, legal alternative to the traditional textbook."

For even more resources, consult the University of Texas Libraries research guide on creating OER (linked below).

University of Texas Libraries: Creating OER

OER & Open Access Textbooks

Bay College Library
Currently has three faculty-written OER textbooks: one on career exploration and two on U.S. History.
BCcampus OpenEd: Find Open Textbooks
Our open textbooks are openly licensed using a Creative Commons license, and are offered in various e-book formats free of charge, or print on demand books available at cost.
Boundless ($)
Affordable, open and customizable textbooks. Hosted by Lumen Learning.
California Open Online Library for Education
The three State of California Higher Education Systems are working together to provide you easy access to quality FREE and OPEN eTextbooks that everyone and anyone can use for teaching and learning.
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (OER)
Our mission is to expand access to education by promoting awareness and adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER). Over 250 colleges have joined us and many more participate in our activities and use resources on the website.
Flat World Knowledge ($)
Textbooks are free to read online, with low-cost downloadable and print-on-demand options.
LibreTexts
All Libretexts libraries are accessible to everyone via the internet, completely free. We believe everyone should have access to knowledge. Not only is LibreTexts always accessible online, LibreTexts is promoting assistive technologies across the entire platform.
Lumen Learning
Overseen by influential OER activist David Wiley, Lumen's Candela Learning catalog offers links to its own content as well as the content developed by institutions it has worked with on OER initiatives, such as Tidewater Community College and Washington State Community and Technical Colleges. The content isn't technically downloaded as a file; it's made available in HTML format, which can be accessed through a school's learning management system.
MyOpenMath
MyOpenMath is designed for mathematics, providing delivery of homework, quizzes, and tests with rich mathematical content. Students can receive immediate feedback on algorithmically generated questions with numerical or algebraic expression answers. And it can do so much more, providing a full course management system, including file posting, discussion forums, and a full gradebook, all designed with mathematics in mind.
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MyOpenMath can be used to web-enhance an on-campus course, as part of hybrid course, or to run a fully online course. To get some idea how the system can be used by instructors, watch this quick three minute video [+]

MyOpenMath provides pre-built courses based on popular open textbooks. Some of these course only include online homework, while others include videos, handouts, and instructor resources. The books for these courses can be read online, or printed copies can be ordered through our partner site, OpenTextBookStore.com.
OASIS
OASIS from SUNY Geneseo - 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 61 different sources and contains 160,717 records.
Open Culture
Started by an associate dean at Stanford's continuing studies program, this site brings together a curated "meta collection" of free textbooks taken from many of the other sites included in this article as well as other pockets of the web where a faculty member has put digital textbooks together for his or her courses and made them openly available. Open Culture also provides collections of free online courses, movies, audio books and other forms of education content.
Openstax College
Rice University initiative. Free open textbooks developed and peer-reviewed by educators.
Milne Open Textbooks
Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
Open Textbook Library
Provides reviews of OER. Browse subjects to see extensive reviews that include: comprehensiveness, accuracy, relevance/longevity, clarity, consistency, modularity, organization/structure/flow, interface, grammatical errors, cultural relevance, and comments.
Project Gutenberg
This effort to digitize cultural works has been plugging away at its mission since 1971, when it undertook the creation of an electronic version of the Declaration of Independence, item No. 1 in its collection. Most of the contents are public domain books — both the obscure and the beloved. On any given day nearly 100,000 copies of books are downloaded from the site.
Saylor Academy
Although better known for its free courses, this online education organization also makes the curriculum from each course available in downloadable textbook form by anybody.
Skills Commons
Explore free and open educational resources in Workforce Development
Developed in partnership with local industries. Reviewed by subject matter experts Focused on skills businesses need today. Use the interactive Industry Wheel to locate materials that are free and open for you to use! You can also contribute to Workforce Training materials.
UC Davis STEMWiki Hyperlibrary
This collaborative project focused on STEM topics invites students and instructors to develop content such as labs, homework and worksheets, which is then shared with everybody in an open manner as a textbook replacement or "wiki-text." Specific instructors may maintain their own mashups of the wiki content for use in their courses with links through the site. Currently, wikis cover chemistry, biology, geology, statistics, physics, math and solar. The work is directed by chemistry prof Delmar Larsen.
Wikibooks
Promising "open books for an open world," this site, which is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, offers 2,900 textbooks, categorized by subject, completion status and reading level. Many of the books are available for download as PDF files.
World Digital Library
WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.
Writing Spaces
Textbook project for college level writing courses.

Open Access Tools & Materials

Within Canvas settings, it's possible to add the following Apps:

Khan
Ted Talks
Vimeo
YouTube
Films on Demand
Flickr

You can then search for and insert Open Access materials while editing any page.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Learn about Creative Commons and the attributions.
OPEN Washington: Attribution Builder
Build a license for your own materials.
Zamzar
Free online file converter.