Finding OER - Open Educational Resources - CMU LibGuides at Carnegie Mellon University

Finding OER - Open Educational Resources - CMU LibGuides at Carnegie Mellon University
Open Educational Resources: Finding OER
Introduction to OER
Finding OER
Developing OER
Creative Commons Licensing
Large OER Repositories
Open Textbook Library
: This database, overseen by the Open Textbook Network, includes books authored by faculty at more universities across the country, and many include peer reviews. You can browse by subject or do a simple search.
OASIS
: A new database to search hundreds of sources of OERs hosted by SUNY Geneseo.
OER Commons
: This database of OERs lets you search by education level, learning material type and accessibility. Supported by the not-for-profit group Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education.
Merlot:
Run by the California State University System, MERLOT curates OERs that have been licensed for reuse and materials that are online for free. Search includes audience, language, material type, Creative Commons licenses and accessibility.
Pressbooks
: Pressbooks Directory is a free, searchable catalog that includes 6,916 open access books published by 185 organizations and networks using Pressbooks.
Audiovisual & Multimedia
Courses & Supplemental Materials
Repositories
Search Engines
Software & WebApps
Textbooks & Training Materials
ARTstore Public Collections
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Powered by ARTstor, this open access platform includes over 100,000 zoom-able images that can be printed, exported, and shared.
Critical Commons
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A community of people who seek to promote the use of media in teaching. The materials posted here are mostly presented using Fair Use guidelines.
Flickr Creative Commons
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Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license.
HippoCampus
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HippoCampus, a project of the Monterey Institute of Technology and Education (MITE), is full of high-quality resources in a variety of subjects. It is aimed at high school and college level users.
Internet Archive Book Images
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2.6 million images with searchable tags.
Jamendo
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Songs by musicians who want to share their music.
Khan Academy
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Hundreds of short educational videos covering many subjects; especially strong collections in science and math.
PhET Science Simulations
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These interactive tools from the University of Colorado at Boulder are mostly CC licensed.
Smithsonian Open Access
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2.8 million high-resolution 2D and 3D images from across the Smithsonian's collections.
SoundCloud
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place for creators looking to share and distribute music and audio online
TED
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Inspiring thinkers on a range of subjects present big ideas and lectures on a regular basis- completely CC licensed.
Unsplash
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Overe 1 million photos that can be freely downloaded and used for either commercial and non-commercial purposes, no permission needed (though attribution is appreciated!).
Vimeo
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A social network of video producers. This is a great place to look for a wide variety of content- some is completely open for redistribution, some is open access.
Wikimedia Commons
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The thinkers behind Wikipedia bring you images, video and music all openly licensed or in the public domain.
Available from Carnegie Mellon University
Open Learning Initiative
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Complete courses from Carnegie Mellon University
Available from External Sources
Academic Earth
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Find lectures and videos from some of the most respected instructors in the world.
Bridge to Success
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Materials, mostly study skills, to support students transitioning to college.
Coursera
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Large library of MOOCs, some of which have material freely licensed for re-use.
EdX
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Library of college-level courses from a variety of high-profile universities. Some course materials are freely licensed for reuse.
LearningSpace (from Open University)
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All of the learning materials presented on this site are CC licensed, but don't confuse "Learning Spaces" with the full Open University- their licensing/copyrights are different.
MERIA: Free Books (Middle East Review of International Affairs)
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Selection of full text books on Middle East international affairs
Miríadax
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Miríadax is an Ibero-American MOOC platform with complete courses in Spanish for a variety of topics.
MIT OpenWare
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a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world
Noba - Psychology Modules
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A series of modules in the field of Psychology from Introductory courses to more advanced topics.
OAIster
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Freely accessible digital resources from open-archive collections worldwide.
OCW Utah
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Open education course materials aimed at a high school level.
OEDb
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The Open Education database is tool that lets you explore over 10,000 free open courses and interactive resources from top universities around the world.
OERu
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OERu offers a number of full courses in fields like business, economics, digital literacy, and history from partner universities around the world.
Open Course Library
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The WA Open Course Library project offers 81 of Washington's most enrolled courses. There are a lot of great readings in these course files. Great community college content
Open Courseware
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An independent search engine that indexes open education classes from places like MIT, Yale and UMass. Adds extension to your browser.
OpenCourseWares (OCW) Finder
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Per their website, "Search, Recommend, Collaborate, Remix". Universities and other OCW providers can register to list their courses.
OpenStax
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Rice Connexions is providing peer reviewed, quality open textbooks with interactive components. There are some amazing textbooks available here, with more in production.
Saylor.org
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Saylor offers full courses online. It can be really helpful to use the reading lists from Saylor to find and organize your courses.
Study.com
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Free supplemental content fee (pay for courses)
MERLOT
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This repository is one of the biggest and more famous places to find and share teaching resources.
Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
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A repository that searches simultaneously across 22 sources of OER material
OpenStax
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Rice Connexions is providing peer reviewed, quality open textbooks with interactive components. There are some amazing textbooks available here, with more in production.
GitHub
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Millions of developers and companies build, ship, and maintain their software on GitHub—the largest and most advanced development platform in the world.
OER Commons
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This resource seeks to collect and distribute a variety of OER at a variety of levels and subjects.
Open Textbook Library
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This is an online collection of textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. The 708 current titles have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality and can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost.
Open Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS)
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Developed by SUNY OER Services, this robust search tool aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS gives the user access to various open resources, such as textbooks, courses, interactive simulations, and modules.
American Memory Project
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Free and open access to Library of Congress collections.
AMSER
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Materials in the Applied Math and Science Educational Repository are free for use and adaptation. Most resources are at the high school and community college levels.
Community of Online Research Assignments
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Open resource for faculty and librarians about Research Assignments. A research assignment is anything that requires students to engage with information resources in a critical or reflective way. This most often includes finding, retrieving, analyzing and evaluating, using and integrating, or organizing the information in order to produce new knowledge.
Connexions
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Large repository of individual teachers' content, some courses and lots of modular writings about a variety of topics.
CORE Open Access Research Papers
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Mission is to aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public. In this way CORE facilitates free unrestricted access to research for all.
DiscoveredEd
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From the website, "Discover the Universe of Open Educational Resources"
EDSITEment!: the Best of the Humanities on the Web
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Provides easy access to free online resources from art & culture, history & social studies, literature & language arts, and world language (created and maintained by the federal government)
Google's Advance Search
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use the usage rights filter and select the desired permission
Google Art Project
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Collaborative open-access project between Google and over 150 art partners worldwide. "Users can explore a wide range of artworks at brushstroke level detail, take a virtual tour of a museum and even build their own collections to share."
Internet Archive Scholar
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Internet Archive Scholar - in it's beta version (2021)m, this engine includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in Internet Archive
JISC Digital Media
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This website maintains guidance on finding video, audio and images online, including those licensed as Creative Commons.
Jorum
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Website description: "free learning and teaching resources, created and contributed by teaching staff from UK Further and Higher Education Institutions"
Mason OER Finder
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George Mason University's real-time federated search engine for OER materials, searches include public domain library of congress, JSTOR open access, directory of OA books etc.
OpenCulture
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This blog formatted repository seeks to bring together free resources on culture and education. The list of movies here is impressive.
Open Professionals Education Network (OPEN)
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A site that will help you find openly licensed media elements to use within your courses.
Openverse (previsouly Creative Commons Search Engine)
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Search across 500 million + openly licensed and public domain images
DiscoverEd - "Discover the Universe of Open Educational Resources"
Pressbook Directory
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Index of openly published books using Pressbooks network - includes a filter for H5P activities
Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES)
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This repository contains learning materials, software, data, and models for teaching quantitative skills in undergraduate biology courses. QUBES is developed in part by faculty at the University of Pittsburgh.
Science.gov
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"...Searches over 60 databases and over 2,200 scientific websites to provide users with access to more than 200 million pages of authoritative federal science information including research and development results".
WeBWorK
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WeBWorK is an open-source online homework system for math and science courses. WeBWorK is supported by the MAA and the NSF and comes with a National Problem Library (NPL) of over 20,000 homework problems. Problems in the NPL target most lower division undergraduate math courses and some advanced courses. Supported courses include college algebra, discrete mathematics, probability and statistics, single and multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra and complex analysis.
Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center
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Open data portal of the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny county, providing free access to regional datasets on a wide range of topics.
zbMATH Open
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zbMATH Open (formerly known as Zentralblatt MATH) is the world's most comprehensive and longest-running abstracting and reviewing service in pure and applied mathematics. It is edited by the European Mathematical Society (EMS), the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and FIZ Karlsruhe. The editorial work is done by the Berlin office of FIZ Karlsruhe, which as a member of the Leibniz Association is a non-profit company and a recognized organisation serving the public interest. Since January 2021, zbMATH Open has been available as an open access database.
Still don't like what you find?
Did you know you can program your own search?  Try Google's
Programmable Search Engine
AlternativeTo
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AlternativeTo is a free service that helps you find better alternatives to the products you love and hate - AlternativeTo.net
Audacity
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Audacity is a free, easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. Audacity developed by a group of volunteers and distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is available for anyone to study or use.
Blender
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Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite licensed as GNU GPL, owned by its contributors.
Curriki
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Open educational materials for K-12.
GIMP
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GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes.
Inkscape
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Inkscape is Free and Open Source Software licensed under the GPL.
LibreOffice
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LibreOffice is a free and powerful office suite, and a successor to OpenOffice.org (commonly known as OpenOffice).

Its clean interface and feature-rich tools help you unleash your creativity and enhance your productivity.
OpenOffice
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Compatible with other major office suites, Apache OpenOffice is free to download, use, and distribute.
Wikipedia's is a good place to search for
open software lists
.  Below are some highlights:
Open Source Android Apps
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Open Source Applications & Services
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Open Source iOS Apps
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Open Source Software Packages
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Open Source Video Games
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Open Source Web Apps
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Affordable Learning Georgia
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List of courses and the adopted OER resource for top 100 undergraduate courses
American Institute of Mathematics
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A list of open textbooks in various subdisciplines of Mathematics approved by the AIM editorial board.
Aviation Handbooks and Manuals
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Open Textbooks on Aviation from the Federal Aviation Administration (US).
BC OpenEd
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A curated collection of open textbooks, many reviewed by British Columbia faculty.
Bloomsbury Academic
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Bloomsbury is a well-respected and long time UK publisher who has released some of their academic titles for open access/open education.
FreeBooks4Doctors
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Free medical textbooks.
Google Books
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Some books presented in this mass conglomeration of scanned books are fully available, most are excerpted.
LibreText
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Library of open textbooks and ancillary materials produced in partnership with U-Cal System and the U.S. Department of Education
Lyryx Open Textbooks
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Lyryx offers high-quality open textbooks in the fields of accounting, mathematics, and economics. They also have optional added (paid) resources such as homeworks and quizzes to accompany the open textbooks.
Open Education Consortium Courses in STEM
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Offered as a special project of OEC
OpenLibrary
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Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published
Open Research Library
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Access and download openly published monographs from multiple university presses and other publishers
Openstax
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partner Lumen Learning offers a wide array of open content that you can access for free. Their Waymaker and OHM modules are low-cost homework platforms that can be integrated with Moodle. View all Openstax partner companies.
OpenStax College
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Rice Connexions is providing peer reviewed, quality open textbooks with interactive components. There are some amazing textbooks available here, with more in production.
Open SUNY Textbooks
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large subject catalog of open textbooks available for adoption and reuse
Open Textbook Library
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This is an online collection of textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. The 708 current titles have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality and can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost.
Project Gutenberg
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Find the full text of classics and public domain works from the first massive ebook creating organization in existence. Nothing fancy here, just files with the full text.
Rebus Press Community
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platform for creating and publishing open textbook
SkillsCommons
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Free and OPEN digital library of Workforce Training Materials
WikiBooks
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A project of the Wikimedia Foundation, this collection of group written textbooks in a variety of sources follows rules similar to Wikipedia.
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Developing OER >>
Nov 20, 2025 2:24 PM
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Open Educational Resources