Resources for Discovering & Using OER In Your Courses

Below are seven popular tools to locate, create, and store open textbooks and resources. See the MERIT Library Open Education Resources research guide for more options and advice.

Instructors needing assistance with discovering and implementing open content are invited to email the Scholarly Communications Librarian Carrie Nelson.

Mason OER Metafinder tool

• Searches more than a dozen large sources of open educational resources.

Open Textbook Library

• Helps instructors find affordable, quality textbook solutions. All textbooks in this library are complete and openly licensed.
• Includes ~170 high quality open textbooks in a wide variety of subject areas.
• All textbooks are free to use, adapt, and distribute. Open textbooks can be downloaded for no cost, or printed inexpensively.
• Textbooks can usually be downloaded in PDF format, as well as EPUB and HTML.

OER Commons

• Provides tens of thousands of open educational resources (OER) for free to educators around the world.
• Create, share, and discover OER in a wide variety of subjects.

Open Stax

• Open Stax is home to a growing number of openly licensed, peer reviewed textbooks in subjects ranging from Pre-Algebra to Macroeconomics.
• Variety of formats available to access materials including online, Kindle, Chegg, the new Open Stax mobile app, or utilizing a low-cost printing option.

LibreTexts

• LibreTexts provides 300+ learning objects related to math, science, and social sciences, including textbooks, ancillary materials such as 3D visualizations and simulations, lab experiments, homework exercises, and course shells.
• OER Remixer allows instructors to adapt and assemble texts drawing from content across the Libretext platform.

MERLOT

• MERLOT is a curated collection online teaching, learning, and faculty development resources and services contributed and used by an international education community.
• MERLOT boasts a strong peer-review process evaluating on three criteria: Content quality, effectiveness, and ease of use.
• Use MERLOT’s powerful search tool to discover a wide variety of resource types including web sources, PDF, video, images, and much more
• NOTE: Not all materials are openly licensed or free of charge. To search for these specifically, use the Advanced Search option and search by License.

Oasis

• Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) searches open content from 98 different sources and contains 368,237 records.
• Wide breadth of materials including textbooks, images, videos, audiobooks, MOOCs and other learning objects.