Library: Northwestern Open Textbooks, OER &amp; Other Open or Free Resources for Faculty: Finding OER

OER People & Projects at Northwestern

Faculty OER Adoption Program

CT State Northwestern supports faculty adoption of open resources. Open resources benefit students and faculty by providing course materials at no or low cost, and customize materials to suit the needs of students and faculty.

OER Support Around the College

There are many faculty and staff at Northwestern who use OER, support faculty adoption of OER, or have the knowledge and expertise to help with specific issues. Ask one of your colleagues about OER today:

Bev King, Educational Technology Coordinator

James Patterson, Library Director

Naomi Toftness, Public Services Librarian

Seth Kershner, Public Services Librarian

Sources for Finding Open Textbooks & Other OER

Kirkwood Community College has put together a great 3-part series on resources for locating OER:

OpenStax College
OpenStax is a place for instructors who simply want an open textbook that’s ready to go. These textbooks can be adopted as-is, can be edited by faculty adopters through the Connexions website, and are free to use online or downloaded in PDF format. They also have print and bound versions available for purchase (as of now the price varies by title, between around $30 and $60). The quality of these texts is very good. They are authored by faculty and have been carefully edited and peer reviewed. They also have ancillary materials to accompany each text.
BCcampus
A repository of open textbooks, peer reviewed and adapted by faculty in British Columbia, Canada.
CCCOER: Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
This consortium website offers a wide variety of resources for faculty looking for OER, workshops, or colleagues to connect with.
Connexions
Similar to MERLOT, "a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc." Will also host your original content.
MERLOT
"Free and open" online learning materials - mostly bite-size pieces rather than whole textbooks.
OER Commons
Find a wide variety of open resources, mostly in bite-size chunks for easy collection and remixing.
Milne Open Textbooks (formerly Open SUNY Textbooks)
State University of New York's open textbook publishing initiative repository.
Saylor Academy Bookshelf
Another site that focuses mostly on open textbooks

Discipline-Specific OER Sources

Career & Technical Fields

Skills Commons A growing repository of materials developed by Federal TAACCCT Grant recipient colleges. Some great resources here! Includes these industries: Construction; Educational Services; Health Care & Social Assistance; Administrative & Support Services; Waste Management Services; Professional, Scientific & Technical Services; Information Technologies; Mining, Quarrying, Oil & Gas Extraction; Repair & Maintenance; Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing & Hunting; Manufacturing.

Language Learning

Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning "The COERLL is one of 15 National Foreign Language Resource Centers funded by the US Department of Education. The overall mission of these federally-funded centers is to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages by producing resources (materials and best practices) that can be profitably employed in a variety of settings."

Math & Sciences

AMSER: Applied Math and Science Educational Repository "AMSER is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use. AMSER is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the National Science Digital Library, and is being created by a team of project partners led by Internet Scout."

American Institute of Mathematics: Approved Open Textbooks List "Open-source or open-access textbooks that have been judged to meet the evaluation criteria set by the AIM editorial board.

The Chem Collective "The ChemCollective is organized by a group of faculty and staff at Carnegie Mellon who are interested in using, assessing, and creating engaging online activities for chemistry education."

ChemWiki "The Dynamic Chemistry e-Textbook"

MyOpenMath MyOpenMath runs on the open source, IMathAS platform, providing free hosted use of this platform in support of free, open textbooks like the ones listed on OpenTextBookStore.com. 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.

Open Textbook Store "OpenTextBookStore was created by educators frustrated with the time involved in finding adoptable open textbooks, with the hope to make open textbook adoption easier for other faculty. Just to be clear, we are not a publisher. This is just a listing site for publicly available open textbooks, maintained by a teacher. Print copies are made available through third party print-on-demand companies. Many of the courses have course packages available through MyOpenMath.com, which provides free online homework for several open math textbooks."

Scottsdale (AZ) Community College Math Blog A list of Open and Sharable Resources and tools utilized by the SCC Math Department

Nursing and Allied Health

Skills Commons Open licensed materials developed by grant institution recipients in career training fields, including Health Care.

Social Sciences

Noba Project "Teach and learn psychology for free"

OER-Based Courses

Lumen Learning
Lumen Learning publishes open courses to make it easier for faculty members to adopt and teach with open educational resources (OER). And to make education more affordable for thousands of students every year.
Open Course Library
The Open Course Library is a project to design and share 81 high enrollment, general education, and pre-college *courses*. These materials can be used for face-to-face, hybrid and online delivery. Their goals are: Lower textbook costs for students; Improve course completion rates; Provide new resources for faculty.

Open and/or Free Music, Films & other Media

Creative Commons: Media Search
[this is not peer-reviewed] Media search (includes images, music, video, websites)
Internet Archive
Free Movies, Music, Books & Wayback Machine: exceptional resource!
HippoCampus
Materials are free but may not be copied or transformed.
PBS Video
PBS has free streaming video of many of their programs. (Free but not open.)

Free and/or Open Books (many in public domain)

Project Gutenberg
Books in the public domain (most of these are books old enough that their copyright has expired).
Open Library
An open project, user-contributed files and fixes, books available in many different formats. Wonderful online reading interface!
Bartleby
More books in the public domain.
Creative Commons: Books
[this is not peer-reviewed] list of books (not limited to textbooks) available under a Creative Commons License
NCBI Bookshelf
This is a service from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health. It provides free access to over 700 texts in life science and healthcare.
FeedBooks
Feedbooks sells e-books but also has and links to a variety of free books in the public domain. They describe themselves as "a cloud publishing and distribution service, connected to a large ecosystem of reading systems and social networks." Find the free books by clicking "Public Domain" at the top of the page, or browse the "Original Books" link for more unique titles.
Classic Reader
A site with many classic, public-domain ebooks for download. This site is maintained by an individual small business.

Northwestern Campus Library

Northwestern Open Textbooks, OER & Other Open or Free Resources for Faculty