Skip to Main Content

Teacher Education: Open Access/OER

Teacher Education Library Resource Guide

Quick Search for OER

Type your search, then click the source you wish to search.

Hint: Enclose phrases in quotation marks, as in "critical thinking".



Need more information?

OpenStax/Connexions is a place to find, adopt, and adapt textbooks and associated materials and to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.

Open Oregon Searches courses and describes and links to the resources used. Oregon community college instructors use these resources to reduce textbook costs in their courses. If you see a name and email address, feel free to contact that person about their class.

Skills Commons from the US Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program is a free and open online library free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development. This site is great for program, course, and curriculum development.

The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) helps you find Open Educational Resources. Unlike other OER discovery sites (e.g, OER Commons, OASIS, MERLOT, OpenStax, etc.) with our Metafinder you aren't searching a static database that we've built.  Instead, the OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button.

MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy.

The Open Education Consortium is a free and open digital publication of high quality university-level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content. They come from universities all over the world, such as MIT, Harvard, Yale, Tufts, Open University Netherlands.

"AMSER (the Applied Math and Science Education Repository) 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."

ATE Central "With an emphasis on two-year colleges, the National Science Foundation's ATE (Advanced Technological Education) program focuses on the education of technicians for the high-technology fields that drive our nation's economy."

Open Access Databases for Education

  • American Archive of Public Broadcasting
    "The Library of Congress and WGBH in Boston have embarked on a project to preserve for posterity the most significant public television and radio programs of the past 60 years: The American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The American people have made a huge investment in public radio and television over many decades, calculated at more than $10 billion. The American Archive will ensure that this rich source for American political, social, and cultural history and creativity will be saved and made available once again to future generations."
  • Annenberg Media
    Free streaming video series on most subjects for use by individuals or instructors.
  • Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
    This tenth edition (1919) contains over 11,000 searchable quotations.
  • BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
    "Search engine for academic open access web resources. Full text of about 70% of the indexed documents can be accessed."
  • Code of Federal Regulations
    A codification of the general and permanent rules published in the Federal Register by the Executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government. (Full-text)
  • Directory of Open Access Books
    Large collection of open access books, made available by academic publishers such as Springer and Brill.
  • Directory of Open Access Journals
    List of free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly online journals. Covers journals for all subjects, in all languages. (Full text)
  • Education Commons
    Almost 200,000 articles available from over 300 institutions.
  • ERIC
    "The search engine was designed to use smart search technology. If you type what you are looking for without quotes or advanced Boolean logic, the most relevant results will appear as the first results."
  • HEARTH
    From Cornell University, "HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance. The first phase of this project focused on books published between 1850 and 1925 and a small number of journals. Future phases of the project will include books published between 1926 and 1950, as well as additional journals. The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on this site. This is the first time a collection of this scale and scope has been made available."
  • JURN
    A curated academic search-engine, indexing 4,348 free ejournals in the arts, the humatie, business, law, science, and medicine. Search or use the directory to access individual titles.
  • MERLOT
    "MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community."
  • National Science Digital Library
    "The National Science Digital Library provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines
  • New York Public Library | The Picture Collection
    " The Picture Collection For those who seek knowledge and inspiration from visual materials, the Picture Collection Online presents more than 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923"
  • Project Gutenberg
    Thousands of free ebooks from the original ebook project.
  • SciELO.org (Scientific Electronic Library Online)
    International collection of over 1,000 open access eJournals.
  • Skills Commons
    "Your FREE and OPEN digital library of Workforce Training Materials Preparing the Workforce for 21st Century Employment through TAACCCT"
  • Springer Open
    "SpringerOpen, launched in June 2010, includes Springer’s portfolio of 200+ peer-reviewed fully open access journals across all areas of science."

Open Textbooks for Education

©2022 Houston Community College Libraries