Open Educational Resources: General Textbook Repositories

At the annual OpenEd conference in Vancouver in 2012, then British Columbia Minister of Advanced Education, John Yap, announced the creation of the B.C. Open Textbook Project. The goal of the project was to make higher education more accessible by reducing student cost through the use of openly licensed textbooks. The project was asked to create a collection of open textbooks aligned with the top 40 highest-enrolled subject areas in the province. A second phase was announced in the spring of 2014 in which an additional 20 textbooks targeting trades, technology, and skills training would be developed.

CCCOER has curated lists of OER repositories to search.

GALILEO Open Learning Materials brings together open educational resources throughout the University System of Georgia, including open textbooks and ancillary materials. This repository is administrated by Affordable Learning Georgia, an initiative of GALILEO and the University System of Georgia which aims to reduce the cost of textbooks to students and contribute to their retention, progression, and graduation.

Collection of textbooks in business, computer science, education, health, science, and the social sciences. Maintained by the University of Georgia.

Open CC licensed textbooks for various disciplines created in partnership by the National Science Foundation and the University of California Davis.

Rich open education site. Search by keyword and limit by material format. Use the open textbook filter to find open texts. The MERLOT project began in 1997, when the California State University Center for Distributed Learning (CSU-CDL at www.cdl.edu) developed and provided free access to MERLOT (www.merlot.org). Under the leadership of Chuck Schneebeck, CSU-CDL's Director, MERLOT was modeled after the NSF funded project, "Authoring Tools and An Educational Object Economy (EOE)".

By using an ISBN, you can find MERLOT Open Educational Resources (OER) that can be used to supplement most textbooks.

Search by subject and education level. Includes learning materials K-16, grad learning materials and more. Supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and formed by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. Find open textbooks, lessons and simulations, adaptations of open work, full university courses. Filter by material type.

Saylor Academy's main project is providing free, self-paced certificate and credit courses to students around the world. The courses are also open courseware (OCW) comprising open educational resources (OER). As such, most materials you find at Saylor Academy can be reused in some fashion. Our courses are curated from free-to-use and OER content created by others. This content uses a variety of licenses. Original content that we create, including the structure of a course uniting all the learning materials, is typically licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts.

Open.Michigan is a University of Michigan initiative that enables faculty, students, and others to share their educational resources and research with the global learning community.

OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. Our free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course.

SUNY OER Services is a scaled-up, networked, and sustainable approach to digital learning and publishing within the SUNY system, using curated OER content, faculty course supports, and instructional technology development and design.

These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.