Open Educational Resources

OER are any type of resources that have been designed for use in teaching and learning and that are: 1) freely available at any time and 2) published with an open license that enable users to reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute them (commonly referred to as the "5Rs"). This could include images, videos, worksheets, handouts, and of course textbooks. 

Open textbooks are available to students free of cost in digital formats. Many open textbooks are accompanied with ancillary resources such as question banks, slides, instructor manuals, and adaptive quizzing platforms.

Varying degrees of 'open' exist between, and even within the sites below. It's important to assess each individual resource for it's appropriateness, accessibility and level of open. Need an intro to Open Education? Try these videos:

There are many places where you can locate high quality OER. We recommend these to get started.

Additional sites: open resources mega sites that offer books as well as other OER teaching tools.

• Pressbooks Directory - a catalogue of all books on the Pressbooks platform. Includes collection lists on various topics.
• Open Research Library - more than 20,000 Open Access books on many topics, through Knowledge Unlatched.
• Assayer - Large catalogue of openly licensed textbooks. Also is a good place to find free books about math, science and computers.
• AU Press - Athabasca University Press - free pdf and low cost print version of mainly Canadian books.
• BCcampus -Textbook and other OER Catalogue.
• BCcampus Open Textbook Collection - Established Open Textbook and OER collections.
• BCcampus Open Textbook Adoption Finder. - organized by topic.
• BCcampus SOL*R-Shareable Online Learning Resources - Shareable, browseable and searchable open learning resources
• Chemistry Library - Open chemistry textbooks, assignments, experiments and more.
• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources - Advocacy, training, and links to college level open textbooks and other courseware.
• HathiTrust Digital Library - HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries and their "aim to build a comprehensive archive of published literature from around the world . It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives."
• National Science Digital Library - Access to teaching and learning materials in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Search by level, resource type, and subject.
• OApen - contains freely accessible academic books mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences.
• OER Commons - Worldwide public digital library of shared teaching and learning materials.
• OpenStax College - OpenStax offers free textbooks that are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable and accurate.
• Open SUNY Textbooks - Open textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries.
• Saylor Free Education - Open textbooks on a variety of subjects
• Textbook Revolution - "Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors. We want to get these materials into classrooms. On this site you'll find links and reviews of textbooks and select educational resources."
• Wikibooks - Wikimedia's community for creating and sharing educational textbooks.

Found something you liked but would like to review it in print prior to adoption? We will try to get you a print copy! Once you have completed your review, we will put it in the library collection.

You can check our library catalogue and search for the keywords open textbook. We might already have the print copy you are after! Try it below!