Open Educational Resources & Open Textbook Collections
Open educational resources (OER) are freely-accessible, openly licensed textbooks, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching and learning. OER can be reused, customized, and widely shared by others. Our top suggestions for open textbooks include:
- LibreText: An online textbook platform that allows instructors to search, use, and create textbooks and learning objects for their courses. Find free textbooks to use in your courses and see what books SMCCD and other college faculty have created and are using in their courses: Biology, Business, Chemistry, Engineering, Espano,l Geosciences, Humanities, Math, Medicine, Physics, Social Science, Statistics, Workforce
- Standard Ebooks: A not-for-profit project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are formatted for readers, open source, and free. Consists mostly of literature and classics.
- Openstax: Peer-reviewed, open textbooks on introductory topics. Students can buy print copies. See their blog post on Teaching online with OpenStax to support emerging social distancing requirements. OpenStax has quiz banks, slides, and other ancillaries freely available for instructors who sign up with them. OpenStax Allies offer competitively-priced homework platforms that work with OpenStax books, and many of them are waiving costs right now.
- Open Textbook Library : Read peer reviews and access open textbooks being used across the world.
- OER Commons: Public library of open educational resources wit platform for content authoring & remixing.
- MERLOT: The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
- Open SUNY Textbooks: An open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. This pilot initiative published high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.
- Open Michigan: Access a range of course materials, videos, lectures, student work and more. Nearly all of the content here is openly licensed for reuse under Creative Commons.
- BC Campus OpenEd: Search for quality open textbooks offered in a variety of digital formats.
- Lumen Learning: Offers a wide array of open content that you can access for free.
Don’t use a standalone textbook? Many instructors chose to use a mix of open resources to support their curriculum instead of just one open textbook. Sources include TED Talks, online news articles from publications such as The Guardian, government information such as cdc.gov, and other high-quality information available online. Some instructors also use Open Scholarly Monographs as educational resources in their course, which carry the same open licenses.
