7 OER Sites Every Faculty Member Should Visit

In preparation for conferences and training sessions, I wanted to develop a list of my top 10 OER sites for faculty members to visit.  As it turns out, I don't have that many.  So, here's my top 7 OER sites that every faculty member should visit (in no specific order).

Open Professionals Education Network (OPEN)

In support of Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded OPEN and encourages grantees to reuse existing OER to save time and effort.  OPEN provides specific sources for grantee use for photo/images, video, audio/music, general education searches, such as repositories, open textbooks and complete courses, including the ones listed below. Select the “Find OER” tab at the top of the page for a list of OER.

College Open Textbooks

College Open Textbooks is dedicated to increasing awareness and adopting OER for community colleges and two-year colleges.  The College Open Textbooks Collaborative consists of twenty-non for-profit and non-profit organizations with over 200 colleges.  Furthermore, the organization provides training opportunities for instructors and peer reviews textbooks.  These efforts are focused on decreasing textbook costs by offering high-quality open source textbooks.

MERLOT II

MERLOT is a program of the California State University.  It contains thousands of learning materials, including textbooks, animations, assessment tools, presentations and much, much more!

MIT OpenCourseWare

In 1999, MIT Faculty developed and launched OpenCourseWare (OCW).  The pilot version ran in 2002 with 50 courses published.  A decade later, 2150 courses have been published with numerous translations available including Spanish and Portuguese.  Additionally, as of September 2013, MIT reported that OCW has tracked over 49 million YouTube views, 43 million iTunesU downloads and over 182 million visits to their website (MITOCW dashboard report). 

OER Commons

This site provides access to OER, as well as tools to organize, create and save.  Allows free registration and advanced search features including Education Level, Material Type and Media Format to name a few.

Open Course Library

The Open Course Library (OCL) was launched in 2011 by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges in order to combat the effect of textbook costs on student success and completion.  OCL created new course material using Creative Commons licenses for 81 of its highest-enrolled courses.

Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization that hosts numerous projects including Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and Wiktionary, all of which are available under a Creative Commons License.  Commons has over 19 million media files including images, sound and videos that can be used at no charge. 

Please feel free to share any of your go-to resources.