Faculty Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER): OER Content

Find sites that collect or search for open resources, including open textbooks, open courseware, and other OER.

InTech is a pioneer and world's largest multidisciplinary open access publisher of books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine.

A network for teaching and learning materials, complete with resources for curriculum alignment, quality evaluation, social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing.

View and share free educational material in small modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports or other academic assignments.

is a knowledge hub that eases a public and multilingual catalog of Open Educational Resources (OER) which aims to support the education community to find those resources and materials that meet their needs for teaching and learning through a specialized and collaborative search system and social tools.

STEM Content (mostly K12)

Multimedia content--videos, animations, and simulations--for various general education courses. For K12 and college.

Contains practice exercises, instructional videos, dashboard analytics and other teacher tools.

Virtually all MIT course content. While this university site is known for its open courses, it also includes an online textbook page with links to the textbook files used in the courses. It's especially useful for finding course materials in areas where OER is sparse: civil, electrical, environmental and mechanical engineering; material and nuclear sciences; and aeronautics and astronautics, among other subjects.

A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs making it easy to access, browse and download.

provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the Internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

Free online physics, chemistry, biology, earth science and math simulations. Available in multiple languages.

High-quality introductory art history content. Multi-media and articles.

Over 100 peer-reviewed open textbooks for use in community college courses. The site also has over 250 more open textbooks submitted for consideration but not peer-reviewed. Those that have been peer-reviewed are typical identified with an asterix (*). All textbooks are free and can be downloaded.

Free and open textbooks suitable for community college (and lower level undergraduate) courses.

Textbooks are free to read online, with low-cost downloadable and print-on-demand options.

Overseen by influential OER activist David Wiley, Lumen's Candela Learning catalog offers links to its own content as well as the content developed by institutions it has worked with on OER initiatives, such as Tidewater Community College and Washington State Community and Technical Colleges. The content isn't technically downloaded as a file; it's made available in HTML format, which can be accessed through a school's learning management system.

Started by an associate dean at Stanford's continuing studies program, this site brings together a curated "meta collection" of free textbooks taken from many of the other sites included in this article as well as other pockets of the web where a faculty member has put digital textbooks together for his or her courses and made them openly available. Open Culture also provides collections of free online courses, movies, audio books and other forms of education content.

Rice University initiative. Free open textbooks developed and peer-reviewed by educators.

The latest publication in this pilot effort by the State University of New York libraries is Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence, which joins 14 other titles written by faculty and published by the libraries.

Catalog of open textbooks created by the University of Minnesota. They have a partnership with other universities nationwide. Faculty can submit a textbook or review textbooks submitted by others. Openly licensed and free to download.

Digital repository of a variety of educational resources, including textbooks.

This effort to digitize cultural works has been plugging away at its mission since 1971, when it undertook the creation of an electronic version of the Declaration of Independence, item No. 1 in its collection. Most of the contents are public domain books — both the obscure and the beloved. On any given day nearly 100,000 copies of books are downloaded from the site.

Although better known for its free courses, this online education organization also makes the curriculum from each course available in downloadable textbook form by anybody.

This collaborative project focused on STEM topics invites students and instructors to develop content such as labs, homework and worksheets, which is then shared with everybody in an open manner as a textbook replacement or "wiki-text." Specific instructors may maintain their own mashups of the wiki content for use in their courses with links through the site. Currently, wikis cover chemistry, biology, geology, statistics, physics, math and solar. The work is directed by chemistry prof Delmar Larsen.

Promising "open books for an open world," this site, which is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, offers 2,900 textbooks, categorized by subject, completion status and reading level. Many of the books are available for download as PDF files.

WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

Textbook project for college level writing courses.

Learn about Creative Commons and the attributions.

This tool finds the most suitable TED talks by English Level, and rates them by rate of speech and linguistic complexity. Users set the speed and complexity levels and then the software spits out the TED talks that match those criterion. The software uses the European ranking for proficiency levels.

Build a license for your own materials.

Free online file converter.