Search for Open Content in Repositories
You can find content with an open license or that is in the public domain in many different places. Mostly resources that you’ll want to find for your course will be grouped by format. Open textbooks have a library, open images live in image databases, open videos are on video sites, and so on.
Why isn’t there one single repository for all open educational resources, like a Google for searching open content? Because people are constantly posting things on the web with all kinds of licensing terms and it’s not possible to catalog the web. The best we can do is keep in mind a few good places to search for usable content - because you really don’t need a Google’s-worth of material for your course, you just need enough material to support students in meeting your learning objectives.
If you’re getting stuck with search, ask a librarian!
Recommended places to search for open educational resources
Textbooks
Open Textbook Library is a collection of openly licensed full textbooks. Many are also peer reviewed.
All types of open content
OER Commons is a repository for open content in many different formats - whole courses, textbooks, videos, handouts, modules, and more. On the search page you can use the drop-down menu to filter your search results by education level, and the results page has even more filters. Some of the content has been reviewed.
Images
Flickr and Google Images both have a drop-down menu in their search results to filter by creative commons license. For lots more open image repositories, visit Open Images.
Recommendations from other Oregon faculty
The Open Oregon Resources page has links to content that other Oregon community college and university instructors are using in their courses. Note: this is a mix of copyright and open content, so double-check before using. Unless you see an open license, it’s under traditional copyright.
Curated lists of OER by subject
Tacoma Community College and BC Campus maintain curated lists of open educational resources by subject and discipline.
OER search engines
OASIS and Mason OER Metafinder are two search tools that enable you to search across multiple OER collections at once.
OER in Spanish and Other Languages
The repositories listed here are places to search for course materials for Spanish speakers (not necessarily materials to learn Spanish).
Collections written or translated in Spanish
- OpenStax has some Spanish translations of their textbooks. From the “Subjects” dropdown on their website, select Spanish to view the collection.
- The Early Childhood Education collection from College of the Canyons has some Spanish translations available. The information is shared in the document Summary of Open Educational Resources in Early Childhood Education.
- Libros en Español is a collection of Spanish-language texts in the public domain provided by Manifold @CUNY.
- Recursos en Español is a curated collection of OER in Spanish hosted by OERCommons.
- Repositorio Institucional de la UNAM Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México houses one of the largest collections of OER in Latin America including theses, peer reviewed journals, books and antique documents.
- LibreTexts Español is mostly machine translation of OER in the site, with a few manually translated books and some that were written in Spanish (it is not possible to identify which is which).
Repositories with language filters
Lists of resources for finding OER in Spanish and other languages
- Lista de Repositorios, Motores de Búsqueda, y Sitios Web con licencias REA
- Repositorios de Acceso Abierto en Argentina
- Acceso abierto: investigación científica
- Repositorio de iniciativas
- OER in Other Languages
- Spanish: Open Educational Resources LibGuide from University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Library
- Open Educational Resources (OER) by Subject: Spanish LibGuide by Skyline College
Searching for Open Educational Resources
Watch the short video below for an introduction to searching for open educational resources.