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Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that come in a variety of formats and can reside in many different locations. Consequently, finding OER can prove to be difficult. Below you will find methods and resources you can use to locate the learning materials that can best fit the needs of your course and students.
Finding OER Toolkit
Follow these 6 steps to begin your search for Open Educational Resources.
- Set aside time. Searching for OER takes time and persistence, just like research.
- Identify keywords. Use keywords from your content area and learning objectives to perform relevant searches.
- Locate an OER text. Browse through OER repositories to see if a full open textbook already exists for your course.
- Supplement. Continue browsing to find other content related to your search like course shells and syllabi. Remember Open Educational Resources can be combined and modified to fit the specific needs of a course.
- Review the resources. As the content expert, use any rubric you deem necessary when searching for new teaching and learning materials to use in your course.
- Ask for help! Request a consultation with, or email openscholarship@utrgv.edu, for support at any time throughout this process.
OER Searching Tools
There are many places one can search for OER. It often takes searching through multiple repositories and aggregators to find something that fits your course needs. The links provided below are a good place to begin your search but are by no means the only places to find open educational resources. If you would like a librarian to assist you during this process, you can fill out the OER/Affordable Textbook Request Form. A librarian will curate resources based on the information you provide.
OER Searching Guide
This linked guide can be downloaded and saved to help you search open repositories for OER. The guide ranks each repository by its ease of use but these repositories can be searched in any order.
Openly Licensed Image Searching Guide
This linked guide can be downloaded and saved to help you search open image repositories for Openly Licensed and Diverse images.
Every platform has its own unique search benefits and strategies. To help guide your searches, we have provided short videos on how to search the most popular OER searching platforms.
Searching OER Repository Tutorials
Search for OER Content
