LibGuides: Sources of Instructional Material: Home

Open instructional materials for specific disciplines/subject areas

See the tabs in this box to get to instructional materials in specific disciplines or subject areas

Also see:

BCcampus Open Education OER by Discipline Directory

National Science Digital Library
"Serving science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education." "Extensive Library, Powerful Findability." Searchable. Limit by subject, education level and collection.
Applied Math and Science Education Repository
A portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.
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Funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the National Science Digital Library, and is being created by a team of project partners led by Internet Scout.
Science Netlinks from the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Find Science Lessons and Tools for K-12
Scitable: A Collaborative Learning Space for Science
"Inspire your undergraduate and high-school AP biology students with resources on genetics and cell biology from Nature Publishing Group, home of Nature, the most cited scientific journal in the world."
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"Using our platform, you can customize your own eBooks for your students. Create an online classroom. Contribute and share content and connect with networks of colleagues."
BioEd Online
Science teacher resources from the Baylor College of Medicine. Videos, slides, lessons and more.
Cell Image Library
Database of images, videos, and animations of cells, capturing a wide diversity of organisms, cell types, and cellular processes.
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From the Center for Research in Biological Systems at UC San Diego
Encyclopedia of Life
"Global access to knowledge about life on Earth." Hosted by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.
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Mission: "To increase awareness and understanding of living nature through an Encyclopedia of Life that gathers, generates, and shares knowledge in an open, freely accessible and trusted digital resource."
iBiology
"Bringing the World's Best Biology to You"
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"iBiology’s mission is to convey, in the form of open-access free videos, the excitement of modern biology and the process by which scientific discoveries are made."
National Center for Biotechnology Information
"Advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information."
National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science
From the University at Buffalo. "To promote the development and dissemination of materials and practices for case teaching in the sciences."
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"Provides access to an award-winning collection of peer-reviewed case studies."
Periodic Table of Videos
Short videos about each element. From the University of Nottingham.
The Scientist: A magazine for life science professionals
"Dedicated to covering a wide range of topics central to the study of cell and molecular biology, genetics, and other life-science fields."
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"Through innovative print articles, online stories, and multimedia features, the magazine explores the latest scientific discoveries, trends in research, innovative techniques, new technology, business, and careers."
Wired Chemist
Includes pedagogical animations, an introduction to chemistry, modules on important topics in chemistry, demonstrations of laboratory techniques, NMR spectral data and problems, and more.
Video collections from The Exploratorium
Video collections on a wide variety of science topics.
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The Exploratorium is a public learning laboratory exploring the world through science, art, and human perception, located in San Francisco, California.

Big HIstory Project
A free, online social studies course designed for secondary schools. "Ask the big questions about our Universe, our planet, life and humanity."
History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web
Designed for high school and college teachers and students, a gateway to useful materials for teaching U.S. history.
Timelines: Sources from History
"This British Library interactive timeline allows you to explore collection items chronologically, from medieval times to the present day."
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
Access to primary sources, and high-quality online teaching modules, including other digital history projects. Especially see their Teaching Resources.
World History for Us All
Innovative model curriculum and resources for teaching world history, targeted to middle and high school.
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Product of a national collaboration of K-12 teachers, collegiate instructors, educational technology specialists and San Diego State University, and the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA.
TimeMap of World History
View changes in regions of the world over time. And more.
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How to use the TimeMap and other materials
Teaching Materials from the American Yawp
"A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook"

Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL)
"One of 16 National Foreign Language Resource Centers (LRC's)funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The overall mission of these federally-funded centers is to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages by producing resources (materials and best practices) that can be profitably employed in a variety of settings."
Language learning resources compiled by Open Culture

NOBA psychology textbooks
"Textbooks from the Noba Collection. Expertly compiled from Noba modules to fit the scope and sequence of common courses."
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"Use them as-is or customize them to fit your needs. Instructor manual, PowerPoint presentations, and test bank available for many modules. Use Noba books as a starting point; add additional modules from our catalog or remove any that don't fit your course. You can even start from scratch and build a textbook that's all your own."

Smarthistory.org
"Resource for the study of art and cultural heritage....collection of videos and essays are designed to be engaging and conversational and cover art that ranges from the paleolithic to the present."
Art History on Khan Academy

MERLOT: Math
Mathematics Community Portal. Curated learning materials, activities, etc. Browse by sub-discipline of math, or search.
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"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."
Worldwide Center of Mathematics
High-quality, free and affordable math textbooks and resources, including a calculus video series.
Applied Math and Science Education Repository: Math
A portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.
American Institute of Mathematics
Approved textbooks

Peer-Reviewed Instructional Materials Online Database (PRIMO)
"PRIMO is a means to promote and share peer-reviewed instructional materials created by librarians to teach people about discovering, accessing, ethically using and evaluating information in networked environments."

Writing Commons
"A free, peer-reviewed, open-education resource for college-level writers, college faculty, and the everyday writer."
EmpoWord: A Student-Centered Anthology & Handbook for College WritersEmpoWord: A Student-Centered Anthology & Handbook for College Writers
"A reader and rhetoric that champions the possibilities of student writing. The textbook uses actual student writing to exemplify effective writing strategies, celebrating dedicated college writing students to encourage and instruct their successors: the students in your class."

ATE Central: Supporting Advanced Technological Education
With an emphasis on two-year colleges, the National Science Foundation's ATE program focuses on the education of technicians for the high-technology fields that drive our nation's economy.

OER repositories

Search within these repositories of Open Educational Resources.

Limit your search by discipline, level of education, kind of resource and more.

OER Commons
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 Textbooks and Books

Open Access Textbooks

Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
Open Textbooks from OER Commons
Search free, adaptable, openly licensed textbooks and supplemental resources.
OpenStax textbooks
Peer-reviewed. Openly licensed. 100% free.

Other kinds of open access books

Project Gutenberg
A library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download or read them online.
Open Library
A project of the Internet Archive. Over 1,000,000 free ebook titles available, mostly public domain, but also a growing lending library of over 200,000 contemporary ebooks.
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Look for a "Read" button indicating full-text available.
More sources of public domain ebooks
List from ebookfriendly.com

OER search

Mason OER Metafinder
"Real-time federated search for OER content."
Searches across 21 different OER repositories. About the MOM.

Open Courseware is available to view and use without enrolling in a course.

Includes syllabi, lectures, exams, assignments, problem sets and more for hundreds of courses.

MIT OpenCourseWare
Yale Open Courses
List of free online courses from Open Culture
Listed by subject

Open University
From the UK.
Coursera
"Build skills with courses, certificates, and degrees online from world-class universities and companies"
edX
"Courses for curious minds on topics ranging from data and computer science to leadership and communications." Also offers a platform for course-building
Open Learning through Harvard's Extension School
Some free, some for a fee.
Udacity
Tech and business oriented
Udemy
Courses are not free. Large variety of courses.

About OER

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation defines open educational resources (OER) as “teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”

Search for different media

Find OER from the Open Professionals Education Network
Places to search for different kinds of open media.

Sources of video content

Also see the OER repositories (top left box of this page) where you can search for video content too

TED Talks
"Ideas worth spreading" from Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED)
VideoLectures.net
VideoLectures.NET is an award-winning free and open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science.
UCTV
"Great minds gather here." Lots of video content from the University of California.

Films on Demand This link opens in a new window
Not open access, but lots of educational streaming video for the CU community.
Includes videos from Films for the Humanities & Sciences, BBC, PBS, Cambridge Educational, National Geographic, History Channel, and more.