“All Open Educational Resources or OER are freely available to anyone who is eligible to use them.”
Open educational resources are increasingly becoming popular. This follows their reliability in as far as enabling academicians to be at their best in their respective disciplines.
All Open Educational Resources or OER are freely available to anyone who is eligible to use them. They draw their name from the fact that they are available for free and feature materials that can be shared, adapted and reused as often as the need arises.
Over the years, these resources have increased in the number.
In the past, there were certain disciplines that were not covered. But, there is an open repository for just about any academic discipline that exists today.
The resources are available to college and high school students, researchers and lecturers. It is not possible to exhaust the list of educational resources that are in existence today.
However, this list provides a comprehensive collection of all the resources that are available today.
Focus has been awarded to sites that are reputable and held in high esteem by a good number of users. The list mainly includes the major categories of open repositories that are available today.
Complete Courses
Most of the repositories indicated below offer complete courses to a targeted audience of academicians. The materials are readily available for students and researches who want to gain an in-depth insight into specific academic subjects.
Academic Earth: this is a reliable online platform featuring lecturers in the form of videos. The lectures are conducted by some of the most respectable instructors on earth, making the platform one of the most reputable open repository on the planet.
Saylor.org: it offers a wide range of full courses online. The platform is very useful for students at various levels of study including those who are just beginning their tertiary education. Students who wish to acquire a new set of academic skills can also find this platform to be remarkably invaluable.
Open Course Library: this is a very large online library featuring a vast collection of some of the most popular courses in Washington. It particularly comprises around 80 of the courses that attract most students in the state of Washington.
Open Courseware: this is an online search engine that houses courses from MIT, UMass, and Yale. The courses are presented in the form comprehensive lecture notes created by some of the world’s best lecturers.
Open Educational Resources By Subject
This group of open repositories are not necessarily meant to provide complete courses. Rather, they provide textbooks and other materials in various college fields. The materials are available to both students and instructors belonging to a plethora of disciplines.
OER By Subject: these are Google documents which have been made by librarians of the Portland Community College. The move came in response to calls by instructors to have an online platform which they could utilize in readiness for lectures and other curricular activities. It features a vast collection of academic materials that have proven to exceedingly useful.
University Of New Hampshire Online Resources: this is a very large online resource which features a wide pool of materials meant for students and instructors in the fields of humanities, STEM and social sciences. The platform is user-friendly, has an amazing user interface and is quite easy to navigate. Almost all the educational materials that are used frequently can be found on the platform.
Virginia Tech OER: this is another renowned discipline specific OER. It features a vast array of licensed books coupled with a wide range of supplemental materials. There are also simulations, videos and several other relevant materials.
Open Access Books
In this category, focus is on the repositories that feature a wide collection of books that are available for free.
OpenStax College Online Platform: this is an amazing online resource for academicians which features a wide range of books in various disciplines. The platform is run and maintained by Rice Connexion. It is responsible for providing freely licensed books that are peer reviewed and interactive in nature. There are plans to expand the platform so that it features more books than it does at present.
College Open Textbooks: this amazing online resource for almost all academic disciplines that exist today is maintained and run by the Hewlett Foundation. The main aim of the foundation is to promote the availability of free textbooks online.
Boundless: this platform features web-based content which can be accessed by anyone from any part of the world. All the content that is present on the site is compiled by reputable experts in their respective academic disciplines. The platform comprises a plethora of books written by academicians from all parts of the earth.
Wikibooks: this is a project which is run and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a collection of text books that have been written by groups of academicians. The books fall in various categories which a user can search for depending on one’s preferred discipline.
Lyryx Opex Textbooks: this is a very large online academic resource which boasts of textbooks in the fields of mathematics, economics and accounting. Users are free to make use of the optional paid resources which include homeworks, research papers and quizzes among others.
Extra-Large OER
This group comprises online resources that are very large. Some of them even contain multiple OERs combined and readily available to users from a wide pool of academic disciplines.
QUBES: the QUBES or Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis is a very large open repository featuring a wide range of resources. It includes learning materials, data, software as well as models that instructors can use for presenting lessons.
All the materials that can be found on the site fall into the category of biology and are solely meant for biology students and instructors. It is a joint program which is partly developed by the University of Pittsburgh faculty of Biology studies.
AMSER: this online platform is specifically meant for community level colleges and high school students. It mainly features resources in the field of applied mathematics and science, which are readily available for use and adaptation.