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Online Teaching Resources for Faculty

Cartoon drawing of an Open Resource textbookPlease remember that students may be experiencing greater financial stress than usual if they’re not able to work due to the coronavirus. You might want to consider investing your time in trying resources and tools that will continue to be free to you and your students after the crisis is over. These options will increase first-day access to required course materials and save students time and money during this stressful time.

Image from Guilia Forsythe, Flickr

Faculty Select - Your One-Stop Shop for OER

Open Access/Free Films Online

Library-licensed E-books, Articles, and Online Resources for the Classroom

Library-licensed material expands the amount of materials available for higher-level coursework and complements other OER materials.  If you are interested in browsing our immense online collection for course materials, here are a couple of our search tools:

  • OneSearch: Search through many resources at once using our OneSearch tool. Whether you are looking for an e-book or searching broadly by subject or keyword, OneSearch is a great place to start your searching. OneSearch is also a good place to find items by citation – just paste the citation right into the search box.
  • Databases A-Z List: If you know which database you are looking for, use this list to find the specific database by title.
  • Databases by Subject List: Our subject librarians have selected the top databases for each subject in this list, helping identify the top resources for each subject.
  • Journal Search: This tool allows you to find journals by title or subject.
  • Streaming Media: We are happy to share that the CSM Library provides access to multiple video platforms. See our Streaming Films page to see how to integrate films in your classroom.

The CSM Library is committed to developing open and affordable solutions that will ease the burden of textbook costs. Affordable course materials are going to be more important to students than ever.

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:

  • 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.