oertoolbox

** OERToolBox: Open Courseware Toolset: Directories, Search Engines, Web Tools. Open Textbooks. Literature Online (and copyright free) **

//Many of these sites provide access to works that are licensed with few copyright restrictions. However, remember to check the licenses and abide by the creator's wishes. Freely accessible, open access resources may still be subject to copyright.// //While open access resources can be used for your course work or your personal use, check copyright before making other uses of resources discovered at these sites. Of course always cite your sources including works in the public domain.// For general information on open educational resources see []
 * OER Tool Box **

What are open educational resources? The broadest definition of “open” means “freely accessible and open licensed.” According to the UNESCO definition, OER “permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.” Some of the resources below may permit access but may have some restrictions on re-use. Faculty may want to visit these sites to get ideas on how to present material. Students may want to visit these sites to find information to supplement their courses. For general information on open education resources, see [] //How open is “open?” Some material at the sites below may allow for use, but not reuse. Or a license may allow for reuse with no modification and with attribution. Be sure to read the copyright licenses at each site to determine the uses allowed. //  [|BCcampus] (British Columbia, Canada). Look for textbooks, course packs, etc.

 [|College Open Textbooks] by Subject. A listing of college-level open textbooks on topics such as anthropology, business, chemistry, philosophy, political science, statistics and probability, etc.

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER). [|Open Textbooks].

 [|CSE Course Webs]. Computer Science and Engineering. University of Washington. Computer Science & Engineering. Portions of these courses in computer science and engineering can be reprinted or adapted for academic nonprofit purposes with attribution. The amount of material available for each course varies.

__[|Curriki] __: Curriki is a community of educators, learners and committed education experts who are working together to create quality materials that will benefit teachers and students around the world. Help support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. Find full courses, units, lesson plans, exercises, games, etc.

 [|Global Text Project] List of open textbooks available via the Global Text Project site,

 [|Hippocampus] : Hippocampus is free, public website for high school and college students that offers [|NROC] multimedia correlated to most major textbooks in the United States. Courses include algebra, calculus, statistics, US history, etc. The site requires the use of Adobe Flash and some use of QuickTime. A high-speed internet connection such as DSL or cable modem is recommended.

 [|KhanAcademy] The Khan Academy contains more than two thousand videos and exercises on topics ranging from arithmetic to physics, finance, history, art history (smARThistory).

__Merlot II __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> : Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues and be recognized for your contributions to quality education.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|MIT Open Courseware] : Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a world leader in offering open courseware.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">[|OEDB: Open Education Database]

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|OER Commons] : OER content is made free to use or share, and in some cases, to change and share again, made possible through licensing, so that both teachers and learners can share what they know. Browse and search OER Commons to find curriculum materials, open textbooks, etc. by subject and grade level. Tag, rate, and review the materials for others.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Open Course Library] : Courses and materials free to download, edit and use. Covers courses in accounting, cultural anthropology, art appreciation, general chemistry, interpersonal <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">communication, research for the 21st century, math in society, life span psychology, and other subjects.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Open Courseware Consortium] (OCW): The OCW is a “ global network of educational institutions, individuals and organizations that support an approach <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">to education based on openness, including collaboration, innovation and collective development and use of open educational materials.” This site offers a search engine for discovering OER.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Open.Michigan] A repository of materials from University of Michigan courses. Provides access to information for health sciences courses in particular. (Some course materials are linked to Coursera and may not be readily available for re-use).

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|OpenLearn Learning Space Directory] : From the Open University's LearningSpace. Categorized by topic, this directory provides a guideline for open courseware provided by the ever-expanding Open University.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Open SUNY Textbooks] (State University of New York). Textbooks on web development and programming, natural resources biometrics, literature and the humanities.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Open Textbook Library] (from University of Minnesota). Textbooks on areas such as accounting and finance, business, management, and marketing, computer science, humanities and language, mathematics and statistics, social sciences, etc.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">OpenAIRE A pan-European open access project linking to over 14 million publications, 17,000 data sets from more than 6520 repositories and open access journals.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|OpenStax College] Textbooks. Founded by Rice University. Textbooks on topics such as U.S. history, microeconomics, psychology, pre-algebra, sociology.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|The Ultimate Guide to Using Open Courseware] Find open courseware.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">MORE RESOURCES

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|arXiv.org] Open access to over a million of e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics. arXiv is owned and operated by Cornell University.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> bibliomania Free online literature with more than 2000 classic texts searchable by genre - fiction, drama, poetry, short stories. Includes study guides and reference material. Also listed, classic non-fiction, biographies, and religious texts.

bioRxiv: The preprint server for biology (in beta).
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">British Library EThoS. Access to over 400,000 doctoral dissertations from Great Britain.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|CogPrints] : A electronic self-archived of papers in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, some areas of computer science, philosophy, biology, etc. related to the study of cognition.

CORR. Open access repository for the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Digital Library of the Commons] Free and open access to full-text articles, papers and dissertations on the concepts of the commons, common-pool resources, and common property. Housed at Indiana University.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Free eBooks (from Mobileread)] Extensive list of sites to find classic texts, etc in various formats for ereaders. Caveat: Some sites lead to books for sale while also including free ebooks. Some sites lead to contemporary, self-published books that might not be suitable for classroom teaching. A couple of sites that are listed ab Mobileread: [|Fiction@Classic Reader] - browsable list of classic fiction titles. [|UC Press E-Book Collection, 1982-2004] - freely-available non-fiction books from University of California Press.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> FreeLunch.com – Free economic, demographic and financial data from Moody's Analytics.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Google Scholar] : Search for scholarly material. Some items are NOT freely accessible online full text. To restrict your search to items that are most likely available without a fee, add //filetype:pdf// to your keyword search. Example: (virtual teams intercultural communication filetype:pdf)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|InTech] : Open access publisher covers science, technology, and medicine

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Internet Archive] : The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, continuously adds to their digital library. You’ll discover Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, they provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public. This is an excellent source for primary documents.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Irish Resources in the Humanities] : Although this site began as a directory, it is growing into an archival search machine. Internet sites are chosen for their information, categorized and listed. But, now you also can use an advanced search feature to discover information.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Jorum.] (The UK’s largest repository for discovering and sharing Open Educational Resources. (Some materials are not licensed for worldwide re-use. Check the license.)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|MedEdPORTAL] (Association of American Medical Colleges). Peer-reviewed publications (including teaching videos, presentations, etc) and topics in the health sciences.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|NanoHUB] Online simulation and more for nanotechnology.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|NDLTD: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations] An international organization that supports open access to electronic theses and dissertations. Use the " [|find ETDs] " link for information on locating online theses and dissertations.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|The Online Books Page] (University of Pennsylvania). Lists over 1 million free books (i.e. books in the public domain) on the Web.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Open Culture. [|200 Free Textbooks: A Meta Collection]. Browser the titles of 200 free textbooks.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Open Textbook Library] (University of Minnesota). Includes open, college-level textbooks for topics such as accounting, business, management, marketing, economics, general education, humanities/languages, law, mathematics and statistics, natural and physical sciences, and social sciences. Example of titles: //Business Communication for Success, Business English for Success, First course in Linear Algebra, Principles of Social Psychology.//

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">//ORO. Open Research Online. Peer-reviewed publications from the UK//

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Datasets [|UK Data Archive] : This search engine is an internationally-renowned repository of datasets from UK government, public organisations, and companies. It serves as a “curator” of the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the UK.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Open Book Project] : The Open Book Project is aimed at the educational community and seeks to encourage and coordinate collaboration among students and teachers for the development of high quality, freely distributable textbooks and educational materials on a wide range of topics. Material is largely devoted to topics related to technology.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Open Source Education Foundation] : The Open Source Education Foundation’s purpose to enhance k-12 education through the use of technologies and concepts derived from The Open Source and Free Software movement. They gained a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit status in 2002. This site does not appear to have been updated for some time.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Open Source Living] : a community-driven dynamic archive of Open Source software spanning all major platforms. The archive is the backbone of this site, but you can join a community filled with OSS enthusiasts and use the publication outlet as well.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Open-Site] : This site is edited by volunteers. This site is set up to “find a school”, but does include links to educational resources on many topics.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Osalt] : Open source education thrives on open source software. Use this tool to find open source alternatives to your favorite commercial products. Browse through software categories and compare pros and cons of both commercial products as well as open source software.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Project Gutenberg] : Over 33,000 free books in this online library, and a grand total of over 100,000 titles available through Project Gutenberg's partners, affiliates, and resources. Books can be read on your desktop or laptop computer and other portable devices including iPhones and Android phones. Project Gutenberg

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Saylor Foundation] : The Saylor Foundation has set out to provide a complete general education program online. More than 100 courses have been completed with volunteers working to discover and develop content for up to 241 courses. Disciplines include business administration, English, history, engineering, political science, etc. Uses iTunes as one method of delivering courses.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Semantic Scholar] : Search engine for freely-accessible papers on topics in computer science. Provides a “cite” button to assist in citation (but always be prepared to edit a suggested citation.) (Released November 2015).

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Sofia] (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets). An open content initiative launched by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District (USA). A few courses are already available for downloading such as Physical Geography, Introduction to Java Programming, Enterprise Network Security, Elementary Statistics.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|SparkNotes] : Study notes on literature. While this site is no substitute for reading a book, users gain insight to their readings through these supplements.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|WikiBooks] : WikiBooks is a [|Wikimedia] community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. WikiBooks began on July 10, 2003; since then, WikiBooks has grown to include over 35,000 pages in a multitude of textbooks created by volunteers

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> [|Wikiversity] : This is another Wikimedia project devoted to learning resources, learning projects and research for use in all levels, types and styles of education from preschool to university