OERs

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.

• Open Educational Resources (OERs) are "freely accessible, openly formatted and openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, education, assessment and research purposes." These can include syllabi, books, articles, and other media.
• This is a non-exhaustive, Open Access list divided into six subject areas. Further suggestions and contributions welcome!
• This list is in alphabetical order within each subject area.
• This list on this page includes links to resources and online programs but does not link to individual courses. You may find individual courses when you go to a particular program site. However, there are some individual Humanities courses listed on subpages under the Humanities heading through both the 'MOOCs' and 'Open Courses' links.
• 'MOOCs' are meant for learners who are looking to further their education after 12th grade.
• There will be some overlap of websites that relate to multiple subject areas but we do our best to link you to the particular subject area within that website.
• This list should be helpful to teachers looking for instructional resources and students who want to learn more about particular subjects.

Arts

• The Art Teacher's Toolbox The Incredible Art Department, 1994. -" You can read about art curriculum and instruction, discipline strategies, special education, NCLB, best practices, school law, view contests, and create rubrics."

• ArtsEdge, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2012. - A place to obtain, share, and save lesson plans about the arts.

• KQED, KQED Public Media for Northern California, 2012. - The site has lesson plans and education resources from KQED Education.

• Library and Archives, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2012. "MFA Images has historical portraits, examples of different art movements, images of objects from numerous cultures, and beautiful illustrations that span the Museum's encyclopedic collection."

• Library of Congress Arts & Culture, Library of Congress. - The section of the Library of Congress website devoted to their online arts and culture content.

• National Gallery of Art National Gallery of Art, 2012. -"With the launch of NGA Images, the National Gallery of Art implements an open access policy for digital images of works of art that the Gallery believes to be in the public domain.

• The Saylor Foundation, Art History, The Saylor Foundation, 2012. - Although they do not give degrees, this site offers full programs in many disciplines including Art History.

• Smarthistory, Khan Academy. - "Smarthistory.org is a free, not-for-profit, multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook."

• Snagfilms Snagfilms, 2012.- "SnagFilms.com offers the broadest collection of great independent movies you can watch right now, on demand, for free, and share with others."

• Tux Paint Tux Paint, 2012. - Open source software and lessons for teaching children how to draw.

Business

• 3Plus-U, United Nations. - This is a digital adventure game that explores the issues of child labor, forced labor, discrimination and freedom of association in the workplace.

• Academic Earth, 2012 "Academic Earth aims to provide everyone with the opportunity to earn a world-class education by offering free online classes and online learning tools.

• Everyday Leadership, International Training & Education Center for Health, 2011. - "This collection of learning and training tools is designed to support global health leaders and managers."

• MIT OpenCourseWare, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012. - This site provides a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses free of charge from MIT Sloan School of Managment. They also provide courses in a variety of other subject areas.

• Starting Point: Teaching and Learning Economics, Science Education Resource Center @ Carleton College. - This site provides materials for teaching strategies related to and within economics. It also promotes the sharing of these resources among educators.

Humanities

• Curriki 2006, "For 6 years, Curriki has been the leading K-12 global community for teachers, students and parents to create, share, and find free and open learning resources that improve teacher effectiveness and student outcomes."

• Federal Resources for Educational Excellence United States Federal Government, 2012. - "More than 1,500 federally supported teaching and learning resources are included from dozens of federal agencies. New sites are added regularly."

• Global Text Project, Saylor Foundation. - This website has textbooks that are freely accessible from the website in a variety of topics.

• MOOCs - Available Massive Open Online Courses in the Humanities, sorted by discipline. These are free classes you can register for and take as an active participant, with full access to lectures and associated class materials, as well as assessment tools, quizzes, tests, assignments etc. Some of these classes offer assessment options for certification purposes.

• Open Courses - Available free online course materials for Humanities courses, in a variety of formats such as video and audio podcasts, course notes, readings and supplemental materials. They differ from MOOCs in that they offer no registration or assessment process and students do not participate fully in the course as they do with a MOOC. These resources simply make course resources available online to whomever would like to use them.
• PBS Teachers, PBS, 1995. - "PBS Teachers is PBS' national web destination for high-quality preK-12 educational resources. Here you'll find classroom materials suitable for a wide range of subjects and grade levels."

• Teacher's Domain, WGBH, 2012.- "Teachers' Domain is a free digital media service for educational use from public broadcasting and its partners. You’ll find thousands of media resources, support materials, and tools for classroom lessons, individualized learning programs, and teacher professional learning communities."

• WGBH Open Vault, WGBH, 2011. - "We provide online access to unique and historically important content produced by the public television and station WGBH. The ever-expanding site contains video, audio, images, searchable transcripts, and resource management tools, all of which are available for individual and classroom learning."

Law

Cases/opinions, statutes, and regulations are public domain in the United States, and as such can be reprinted, redacted, etc

• Connexions - This website provides legal class materials. There is no “law” tag, so play around with the searching mechanism and look for particular classes, e.g. “family law.”

• eLangdell Press – Run by CALI [Computer Aided Legal Instruction], eLangdell is soliciting authors to write casebooks, and then provides them gratis and libre (free and alterable). Twenty odd so titles so far, but quickly expanding. Available in PDA, Word and PDF formats.

• Google Scholar – The legal opinions option in Google Scholar provides a great resource for legal opinions, all usable to create a casebook or course packet because they are public domain. Google is increasingly providing major federal and state court opinions. They are working backwards in time too. Keep in mind that most appellate level courts post their opinions on their websites.

• H20 - "The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with support from the Harvard Law School Library, has developed a Web-based platform — H2O — for creating, editing, organizing, consuming, and sharing both legal and non-legal course materials…envision[s] building a corpus of open-source materials available for dynamic use by faculty and students…Piloted with legal casebooks…"

• Legal Information Institute – Hosted and run by Cornell, this site provides free access to U.S.C., C.F.R., UCC, other uniform rules, federal rules of procedure & evidence, state websites, legal encyclopedias, etc. All great free resources without the cost of buying in print.

• MIT Open Course Ware - Sloan School of Management – MIT’s OER collection has law materials, especially in business law.

• OER Commons – This meta-database searches and finds OER materials from other sites.

• Open Stanford on iTunes U – This is a great free collection of podcasts as provided by Stanford. The “Stanford Law” category has a great range of materials from Estate Planning to policy to general jurisprudence. Keep in mind that many law schools will have free legal podcasts from their own law schools.

• Open University Open Learn Open University in the United Kingdom provides Open Learning materials, including a law section!

• Saylor Foundation – Saylor Foundation provides access to law class materials, once again, there is no direct law tag, but there is plenty of materials.

• SSRN – Social Science Research Network, some professors/writers have put finished or working copies on SSRN for free download, with varying degrees of libre.

Mathematics & Statistics

• Applied Math and Science AMSER, 2012 - " AMSER is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use."

• The Electronic Library of Mathematics (ELibM) The Electronic Library of Mathematics, FIZ Karlsruhe / Zentralblatt MATH, 2009. - "The Electronic Library of Mathematics contains online journals, article collections, monographs, and other electronic resources in the field of mathematics. All material is in electronic form and access is generally free, except for some periodicals with a "moving wall", i.e., a certain delay period after which resources become freely available."

• Flexbooks CK-12, 2007 - "California's flexbooks. Become a member and use, modify, create, reorganize, etc."

• GeoGebra, GeoGebra. - Free mathematics software for learning and teaching.

• How to Smile, UC Berkeley, 2012. - "We’re gathering the best STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education materials from the web, and encouraging educators to both use and contribute to the growing collection."

• Khan Academy Khan Academy, 2012 -"Learn almost anything for free"

• MIT Open Courseware Mathmatics Open Courseware, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012. - "MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity."

• OER Commons, OER Commons, 2012. -The OER Commons has a subject browse for open math and statistic resources.

• Open source mathematics, Open Source Math, 2012. - Listing of open source mathematics resources broken down into the following categories: Software, Texts, Papers, and General links.

Science & Technology

• BEN Biosciednet, 2012 -"The BEN Portal provides access to education resources from BEN Collaborators and is managed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)"

• ChemEd DL 2012 -"Here you will find exemplary digital resources, tools, and online services—your 24:7 aid for teaching and learning chemistry."

• Compadre Digital Library, 2003. - "A network of free online resource collections supporting faculty, students, and teachers in Physics and Astronomy Education."

• CSERD The Computational Science Education Reference Desk, 1994.- "A Pathways portal of the National Science Digital Library and funded by the National Science Foundation."

• My NASA Data, NASA. - "MY NASA DATA (MND) is a tool that allows anyone to make use of satellite data that was previously unavailable. Through the use of MND’s Live Access Server (LAS) a multitude of charts, plots and graphs can be generated using a wide variety of constraints. This site provides a large number of lesson plans with a wide variety of topics, all with the students in mind."

• NASA- Education Materials NASA, 2012. - A collection of educational materials provided by NASA for educators. Primarily targeted towards K-12 and separated into categories by grade, there are many modules centered on self learning and curriculum for educators.

• National Science Digital Library NSDL, 2012.- "NSDL is the National Science Foundation's online library of resources and collections for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education."

• Scientific Visualization Studio, NASA. - "The mission of the Scientific Visualization Studio is to facilitate scientific inquiry and outreach within NASA programs through visualization. To that end, the SVS works closely with scientists in the creation of visualization products, systems, and processes in order to promote a greater understanding of Earth and Space Science research activities at Goddard Space Flight Center and within the NASA research community."

• SciVee, SciVee, 2012. - Created in 2007 by Phil Bourne of UC San Diego and Leo Chalupa of UC Davis, the website has expanded to promote the work and collaboration of researchers in a visual manner by sharing videos and presentations online.

• Video and Image Data Access, VIDA supported by the National Science Foundation. - "The Video and Image Data Access (VIDA) collection contains annotated science video and images with content and language appropriate for K-8 standards-based science. VIDA is meant to facilitate sharing the excitement of current research among scientists, science faculty, and teachers through the use of images."

Social Sciences

• iCivics, iCivics. - "iCivics prepares young Americans to become knowledgeable, engaged 21st century citizens by creating free and innovative educational materials."

• National Archives, The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. - This site has teachers' resources such as lesson plans and activities. It also has information about where to find local history resources and how to schedule a visit for your class to your local branch of the National Archives.

• National Constitution Center Educational Resources, National Constitution Center, 2012. - The website has lesson plans, activities, games, videos, and information about historical documents.

• Open Library Open Library, 2010 -"Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. "

• Open Training Platform UNESCO, 2012.- "UNESCO facilitates a collaborative access to existing free training courses and promotes open licensed resources to specialized groups and local communities for development."

• U.S. Government Photos and Images, United States government, 2012. - This site contains many photographs and images from the various departments of the United States government.