Finding OER

Contact your subject librarian or Library Publishing for help finding OER. We have an OER search team that can assist you.

Top Places to find OER ↓

BC Campus Open Ed A collection of open textbooks hosted by the provincial British Columbia initiative, BC Campus.
Open Library Ontario A collection of OER hosted by the provincial Ontario initiative, ECampus Ontario.
OER Commons A multidisciplinary OER collection with a wide variety of resource formats.
Open Stax High quality OER textbooks and teaching resources.

Open Education Alberta Adaptable open textbooks created at Alberta institutions.
Milne Open Textbooks Milne Open Textbooks publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed textbooks for use in higher education.
Open Textbook Store A free collection of mathematics-related open textbooks.
Textbook Equity Free college level textbooks with Creative Commons Licenses.
Wikibooks Open textbooks in a many different languages.

BC Campus OER by Discpline Lists a wide range of open educational resources organized by discipline.
Cool4Ed California's Open Online Library for Education.
Creative Commons Searches a corpus of Creative Commons licensed materials including text, videos and images.
Internet Archive A non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies, music and archived web pages.
Lumen Learning OER course materials outlined into fully developed courses.
MERLOT A repository of multimedia teaching and learning materials maintained by the California State University System.
Open Course Library Collection of shareable course materials like activities, readings, and assessment tools.
Open Michigan Collection of OER from University of Michigan.
Public Domain Core Collection A collaboration between Ryerson and Brock Universities, this collection makes over 50 titles of public domain works available as Pressbooks publications.
The World Lecture Project Find academic videos from around the world.

Academic Earth Free online courses from a number of institutions.
Khan Academy Exercises, videos and learning materials for a variety of disciplines.
MIT Open Courseware Open course content from MIT courses.
Open Yale Courses Introductory-level courses in a variety of subject areas. Including access to recorded lectures and course materials.
The Open Education Consortium Courses, webinars and course materials from around the world.
Saylor Academy Self-paced courses in variety of subjects.

To consult a list OER that other instructors have used, try the BC Campus’ OER Adoption Finder.

Search by discipline or subject first.
If searching by keyword, start with broader concepts and then narrow down using discipline-specific terms and/or limiters available on the platform.
If available, use the “advanced search” function.
Confirm the conditions of use/licence/copyright status of the resource. Some of the suggested repositories include free digital resources that are not necessarily “open” (i.e. under a Creative Commons licence or in the public domain) for reuse or modification without permission. Not sure what the copyright status is of a resource you want to use? Ask the Copyright Office at copyright@ualberta.ca.

The Search Tips on this page are adapted from The University of Ottawa’s Open Educational Resources Guide, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.