GC Library: Open Educational Resources (OER) for Faculty: Find

Find OERs

Discover a wealth of Open Educational Resources (OERs) beyond traditional textbooks. From engaging activities to comprehensive syllabi, educators nationwide are sharing their innovative ideas. Below are some of the primary aggregators where you can find free resources.

OERTX-Discover. Contribute. Collaborate

OERTX is Texas's digital repository of open educational resources (OER), catering to students and educational institutions in the state. It streamlines access to OER e-textbooks and materials frequently used in Texas higher education, while also fostering the creation of new resources tailored to local needs. All resources on OERTX are free and accessible to every student. Start your search below.

The Best of Texas OERs

Austin Community College Collection
A collection of OERs adopted by faculty and departments of Austin Community College.
OpenStax Collection
A collection of OERs from OpenStax.
San Jacinto College Collection
A collection of OERs adopted by San Jacinto College faculty and departments.
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) Collection
A collection of OERs developed as part of an Open Education Resources Grant Program from the THECB.
University of Texas at Arlington Collection
A collection of OERs created at the University of Texas at Arlington.
University of Texas at Austin Collection
A collection of OERs created at the University of Texas at Austin.

Other Primary OER Repositories

MERLOT: Multimedia Educational Resources for Online Teaching and Learning
MERLOT is a free online community where faculty, staff, and students worldwide share learning materials and teaching methods. It's a vast repository with resources categorized by subject, but the abundance of materials can be overwhelming. Utilize filters such as format/resource type and academic level to refine your search effectively.
OASIS
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool designed to simplify the exploration of open content. Currently, OASIS scans through open resources from 117 distinct sources, comprising 388,707 records. Developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library, OASIS aims to enhance accessibility to open educational materials.
OER Commons
Discover freely accessible teaching and learning materials from across the globe. Organize resources for K-12 lessons, college courses, and beyond.
Texas A&M University OAK Search
Explore Texas A&M University's catalog to find open-access materials. Benefit from comprehensive filters, including peer-reviewed articles, books, research datasets, and more.
WISC-ONLINE
A joint initiative involving the 16 colleges within the Wisconsin Technical College System, this resource offers "learning objects" or compact modules covering fundamental topics such as "summarizing" in the humanities or the "anatomy of the heart" in life sciences. It features a robust browsing function for easy navigation.
openNCCC
openNCCC serves as a repository of open educational resources, fostering exploration, creation, and collaboration to enhance teaching and learning experiences in North Carolina and beyond, globally.
Skills Commons
SkillsCommons is a free and open online library containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit, and distribute them at no cost. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Education Network.
Openstax
Openstax gives educators and students access to tens of thousands of educational pages, which can be downloaded in the form of preexisting textbooks, or remixed by teachers into a unique collection designed specifically for their classroom.
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OpenStax is part of Rice University, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable corporation. As an educational initiative, it's our mission to improve educational access and learning for everyone.
InTech STEM
InTech is the publisher of one of the largest open-access collections of books in the fields of Science, Technology, and Medicine.
American Institute of Mathematics
Open textbooks that have been approved by the American Institute of Mathematics.

Classics in the History of Psychology
Classics in the History of Psychology is a collection of full texts of historically significant public domain documents from the scholarly literature of psychology and allied disciplines available on the World Wide Web. There are now over 25 books and about 200 articles and chapters online. The site also contains links to over 200 relevant works posted at other sites.
HathiTrust Digital Library
In the HathiTrust Digital Library collection, you can find titles on everything from African History, Economics, and French Literature to Solar Energy, Public Health, and materials published in more than 400 languages. The digital library of 18+ million digitized items brings together the collections of more than 60 academic and research libraries from across North America and other countries.
Internet Archive
A digital library of over 44 million books and texts, 835 billion web pages, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, 4.8 million images, and 1 million software programs.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a library of over 70,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them, or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with a focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.
Standard eBooks
Standard Ebooks is a collection of high-quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks.
The Banned Book Club
DPLA has launched The Banned Book Club to ensure that all readers have access to the books they want to read. The Banned Book Club makes e-book versions of banned books available to readers in locations across the United States where titles have been banned via the free Palace e-reader app.

Open Courses are free and open digital publications of high-quality college and university‐level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content.

Coursera
Provides free online classes from 120+ top universities and educational organizations. Content is available for personal, non-commercial use.
edX
Founded by Harvard and MIT in 2012, edX is now a leading provider of open courses from top universities. Courses include videos, automated feedback, interactive elements, and a community of professors and fellow students. edX is built on an open-source platform and some content is made available under open licenses.
Harvard Online Learning Free Courses
Harvard Online Learning offers resources like podcasts, lectures, and interactive educational programs for educators, students, and lifelong learners alike. While many of the available courses and materials are open and free, some are fee-based.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy offers courses in a variety of subjects, including math, science, art, economics, and the humanities. It provides short but effective videos, practice problems, and tests for users to learn core academic concepts from preschool to high school and beyond. Content is freely available for personal, non-commercial use.
Lumen Learning
Lumen Learning supports OER adoption at K12 and higher education institutions in order to remove cost as a barrier to education. Lumen contributions to online open courses are licensed under CC BY.
MIT OpenCourseWare
OCW is a free and open publication of material from thousands of MIT courses across the entire MIT curriculum.
MIT Open Learning Library
Free courses with interactive content from MIT OpenCourseWare and MITx.
Open Course Library
The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts.
Saylor Academy
Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative working since 2008 to offer free and open online courses to all who want to learn. We offer nearly 100 full-length courses at the college and professional levels, each of which is available right now — at your pace, on your schedule, and free of cost.

Creative Commons Search
Find content you can share, use, and remix.
Flickr Creative Commons
Flicker is a photo management and sharing platform. Browse recently added photographs marked with Creative Commons licenses or use the advanced search to find photos released under a particular license.
Google Advanced Image Search
Use the "Usage Rights" filter to find images with Creative Commons licenses.
Unsplash
All images available on Unsplash are freely usable. They can be utilized for both commercial and non-commercial purposes without requiring permission from or attribution to the photographer or Unsplash. While not mandatory, providing credit is appreciated whenever feasible.
Wikimedia Commons
A collection of 104,652,666+ freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

Clip Art

Open Icon Library
A consolidated library of icons used in various libraries, window makers, themes, and other applications. Over 10,000 unique icons in SVG, PNG, XPM, ICO, and ICNS formats.
pixabay
Pixabay.com is a free stock photography and royalty-free stock media website. It is used for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics, film footage, music, and sound effects, exclusively under the custom Pixabay license, which generally allows the free use of the material with some restrictions.
Wikimedia Commons Crystal Clear Icons
A collection of icons in Wikimedia.
Wikimedia Commons Tango Icons
A collection of Tango icons from Wikimedia.

Government Images

Library of Congress Science Images and Videos
A collection of government visual materials related to agriculture, astronomy, biology, conservation, earth sciences, energy, engineering, health sciences and medicine, and other related fields.
USA.gov Image Search
A collection of government photos.

Library and Museum Collections

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Discover over 49,951,956 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.
Getty Search Gateway Images
A collection of open content images from the Getty collection.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
The Library of Congress provides access to non-commercial, high-quality content, from digitized photographs, manuscripts, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, and books, to "born-digital" materials, like Web sites. Whenever possible, the Library of Congress provides factual information about copyright holders of the materials but it is up to the user to make decisions about fair use of the materials.
The New York Public Library Digital Collections
NYPL holds more than 180,000 public domain items in its digital collections. Easily limit your search to "public domain" images or explore the public domain collections.
UW Digital Collections
Explore the collections of rare and unique photos, books, maps, recordings, archival documents, and more from across the UW, Wisconsin, and the world.
UWM Libraries Digital Collections
The Digital Collections at the UWM Libraries include over 190,000 photographic images, maps, and books drawn from the collections of the American Geographical Society Library, the Archives, Special Collections, and the Curriculum Collection.
The MET
The Metropolitan Museum of Art collection of over 490,000 works of art from around the world across 5,000 years of history.

Photographs and Historical Images

LIFE Photo Archive
Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.
LUX: Yale Collections
Access millions of records for objects, people, places, concepts, and events represented in Yale’s rich cultural heritage collections. Find and connect with the cultural heritage collections across Yale’s museums, archives, and libraries in new ways and all in one place.
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Searching Yale University Library, Yale Center for British Art, Yale Peabody Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery.
World Images
California State University IMAGE Project Collection of approximately 100,000 images globally covering all areas of visual imagery.

Desmos Math
Graph functions, plot data, evaluate equations, explore transformations, and much more – for free! Explore math with a free online graphing calculator and networked classroom activities.
FLOSS Manuals
A free, collaboratively-built collection of manuals about free and open-source software.
MyOpenMath
MyOpenMath runs on the open-source, IMathAS platform, providing free hosted use of this platform in support of free, open textbooks. The intent is to provide classroom use of the platform, without any required cost to students, for schools wanting a managed install of the IMathAS platform, and to provide students self-study opportunities.
PHET Interactive Simulations for Science and Math
PHET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. PhET simulations are based on extensive education research and engage students through an intuitive, game-like environment where students learn through exploration and discovery.

Music

Community Audio
Part of the Internet Archive, Community Audio, formerly Open Source Audio, contains thousands of community-contributed Creative Commons licensed audio recordings.
Freesound
A collaborative collection of 628,658 free sounds.
Free-Loops.com
Free-Loops.com provides free loops and audio clip downloads to the music production community.
Free Music Archive
Instant access to independent artists and original music. Free to play, download and share.
Jamendo Music
Free music downloads and streaming. Discover and explore 600000+ free songs from 40000+ independent artists from all around the world.
Live Music Archive
The Live Music Archive, part of the Internet Archive, is an ad-free collection of over 250,000 concert recordings in lossless audio formats. The songs are also downloadable or playable in lossy formats such as Ogg Vorbis or MP3.
Partners In Rhyme
General sound effects, public domain sound effects, free royalty-free sound effects
YouTube Audio Library
Audio Library is a channel dedicated to searching, cataloging, sorting, and publishing No Copyright Music, Vlog Music, and Royalty Free Music for content creators

Video

TED Talks
TED Talks are available under the Creative Commons license: CC BY -- NC -- ND 4.0 International
Vimeo
Vimeo is a video-sharing website where users can upload, share, and view videos. Search filters allow users to find Creative Commons-licensed videos.
YouTube
Contributors to YouTube can license their videos for reuse or reuse with attribution. Users can use filters to find Creative Commons-licensed videos.