Our OER database includes OER resources categorized in a number of different ways. Browse through the categories below to view and access resources.
Discipline-Specific OER from Virginia Tech: On these pages you will find openly licensed textbooks along with supplemental material, interactive simulations, and other resources.
Subject Resources from University of New Hampshire: A collection of resources divided into humanities, social science, and STEM categories.
Discipline-Specific Resources from VC/UHV Library: On this page, you will find the largest, most popular repositories of open educational resources separated by subject.
Affordable Learning Solutions: California State University's Affordable Learning Solutions enables faculty to choose and provide more affordable, quality educational content for their students.
AgEcon Search: collects, indexes, and electronically distributes full text copies of scholarly research in the broadly defined field of agricultural and applied economics including sub disciplines such as agribusiness, food security and supply, energy and natural resource economics, environmental economics, policy issues, international trade, and economic development. Content includes conference presentations, working papers, journal articles, government documents, and theses and dissertations.
American Institute of Mathematics: A list of open textbooks in various subdisciplines of Mathematics approved by the AIM editorial board.
AMSER: 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.
Aviation Handbooks and Manuals: Open Textbooks on Aviation from the Federal Aviation Administration (US).
BC Open Textbook Collection: Founded in 2012 with support of British Columbia Minister of Advanced Education, BCcampus currently has over 150 open access, college level textbooks.
Bloomsbury Academic: Bloomsbury is a well-respected and long time UK publisher who has released some of their academic titles for open access/open education.
Bridge to Success: Materials, mostly study skills, to support students transitioning to college.
Creative Commons: Collaborative global OER commons.
Connexions: Large repository of individual teachers' content, some courses and lots of modular writings about a variety of topics.
Cool4Ed (California Open Online Library for Education) Showcase: Search for the courses. Many courses have 1–7 free and open eTextbooks reviewed and in many cases adopted by faculty in the CCC, CSU, and UC.
Critical Commons: 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.
CTE Online: A strong community with thousands of Lesson Plans aligned to CTE, Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards, as well as Integrated STEAM/STEM projects and model course outlines you can copy and share.
Curriki: Open educational materials for K-12.
Directory of Open Access Books: DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers.
Edsitement!: Learning objects and lessons from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It offers a large collection of peer evaluated websites.
Encyclopedia of Life: A massive, collaborative online encyclopedia that aims to provide information about every species on earth.
Free Online Databases: We've created an online guide featuring hundreds of free online databases from universities, to state resources, to open educational resources.
FreeBooks4Doctors: Free medical textbooks.
Galileo: Open textbooks and learning materials.
GRAFT: Custom Google Search that searches over 4,600 university repositories at once. Most results are fully available online for free.
Google Advanced Search: Perform an advanced search on Google and specify the usage rights to find CC licensed results.
Iowa OER: Iowa OER is working to make higher education more affordable for students in Iowa by advocating for the use of open educational resources.
Jorum: The UK's largest repository for discovering and sharing Open Educational Resources for higher and further education and the Skills sector. Currently contains over 16,000 resources.
Jurn: Custom Google Search to search millions of free academic articles, chapters and theses from a variety of publishers.
LibreTexts: Multidisciplinary online textbook platform.
Lyryx Open Textbooks: 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.
Mason OER Metafinder: This search engine from George Mason University is connected to 15 major OER repositories.
Mathispower4u: This site provides over 7,000 free mini-lessons and example videos. All of the videos are closed captioned and ADA compliant.
Mavs Open Press: Open Educational Resources from the University of Texas at Arlington - a small but growing (and recent) collection.
MedEd Portal: Association of American Medical Colleges portal for journal articles for teaching and learning
Merlot: A curated collection of over 65,000 free and open online teaching resources from the California State University System.
MyOpenMath: MyOpenMath is designed for mathematics, providing delivery of homework, quizzes, and tests with rich mathematical content.
OASIS: A large user-friendly OER search engine that allows for users to search by subject or by course material type (e.g. textbooks, simulations, audio).
OE Global: (Open Education Consortium): Includes open textbooks in 24 subjects as well as open courses.
OER Catalogue: OER Directory by Subjects that includes: OER, Simulations, & Videos
OER Commons: A massive collection of OERs divided by subject and grade levels. Includes over 40,500 college level resources.
OER Knowledge Cloud: Not so much a collection as a massive OER search engine.
Open Access Button: This search requires you to already have a citation, title, DOI, or URL before searching and scours the Internet looking for legal, open access versions of your requested article.
Open Culture: This blog formatted repository seeks to bring together free resources on culture and education. The list of movies here is impressive.
OpenMichigan: Home for all things open at the University of Michigan—including expertise and services for open educational resources, open data, and open publications.
OpenRN: Open Education Resources for Nursing.
OpenStax College: Free, peer-reviewed and developed college textbooks.
Open SUNY Textbooks: Open textbooks from the State University of New York System.
Open Textbook Library: Hosted by the University of Minnesota, the Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
OpenVerse: All Openverse content is under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain.
Pressbooks Directory: This Pressbooks Directory provides an index of nearly 3,000 books published across 100+ Pressbooks networks.
Project Gutenberg: Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks.
Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES): Contains learning materials, software, data, and models for teaching quantitative skills in undergraduate biology courses.
Teaching Commons: Open Educational Resources form leading colleges and universities.
Temoa: An OER portal from the Tecnológico de Monterrey System that searches over 500,000 Spanish resources.
Tufts University Open Academic Resources: High quality resources from all Tuft University schools, including research centers and hospitals.
Unpaywall: Not a true database, but this Firefox and Chrome extension helps you find legally uploaded scientific articles from authors, publishers, and repositories themselves.
WikiEducator: An evolving community intended for the collaborative: planning of education projects linked with the development of free content, development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning, work on building, open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs, and networking on funding proposals developed as free content.
World Digital Library (WDL): This collection contains cultural heritage materials gathered during the World Digital Library (WDL) project, including thousands of items contributed by partner organizations worldwide as well as content from Library of Congress collections.
Carnegie Mellon University Open Learning Initiative: 27 free and open courses from Carnegie Mellon University.
Coursera: Massive collection of over 1,800 open courses from 145 universities and colleges around the world.
edX: Over 900 free online courses from partners including Harvard, MIT and UC Berkeley.
The Habitable Planet: A video course for high school teachers and college-level instruction; 13 half-hour video programs, online text, professional development guide, and interactives.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Search OER Commons' collection of 82 courses from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
LearningSpace from Open University: 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.
Miríadax: Miríadax is an Ibero-American MOOC platform with complete courses in Spanish for a variety of topics.
MIT OpenCourseware: MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content.
Noba - Psychology Modules: A series of modules in the field of Psychology from Introductory courses to more advanced topics.
OCW Utah: Open education course materials aimed at a high school level.
OERu: 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: A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. Hosted by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges.
Open Education Consortium Courses: Search the OER courses offered by members of the Open Education Consortium.
Open Learn: Open University in the UK.
Open Yale Courses: Free and open introductory courses from Yale University.
Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences: These resources are available for reuse by teachers and learners worldwide.
Saylor.org: Saylor offers full courses online. It can be really helpful to use the reading lists from Saylor to find and organize your courses.
temoa Course Search: Search over 2,100 courses from several universities including MIT and Yale.
Tufts Open Courseware: Open courses and materials from Tufts University. Some courses may be missing some information as not all material could be made open access.
Creative Commons Search: Creative Commons has created this really useful search engine that lets you search for resources that are CC licensed. The image search is the most useful.
OER Catalogue: OER Directory by Subjects that includes: OER, Simulations, & Videos
Wikimedia Commons: A collection that boasts millions of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.
Data.gov: US government datasets made available under the OPEN Government Data Act.
DocsTeach: Primary Documents regarding Revolution & the New Nation (1754-1820); Expansion & Reform (1801-1861); Civil War & Reconstruction (1850-1877); Industrial United States (1870-1900); Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930); Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945); Postwar United States (1945-early 1970s); and Contemporary United States (1968 to present).
Google Fonts: A directory of open source designer web fonts.
Internet Archive: Videos, Audio, Television, Software, Images, and Concerts.
xkcd: Comics
Aiconica: Browse icons organized in alphabetical categories.
dryicons: icons and vector graphics.
Feather: Simple open source icons available for download.
Font Awesome: Icons
IconStore: Original icons in a vast variety of styles.
The Noun Project: Nearly a million curated icons that can be downloaded on PC or dragged and dropped from the MAC app.
Zondicons: A set of free premium SVG icons for you to use on your digital products.
British Museum: Many of the images on the British Museum's website are provided with a Creative Commons license that allows for reuse (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Broadly Gender Photos: The Gender Spectrum Collection is a stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models.
Brooklyn Museum: Some 68,000 items on the Brooklyn Museum's website are either "orphaned works" or licensed under a Creative Commons license. To be safest, we recommend you check the full record of each image and use only Creative Commons images.
Burst: Fuel your next project with these stock photos geared towards the needs of entrepreneurs.
Clker: Clip Art
Fancy Crave: Download free curated photo packs or browse single photos. Also access the Journal to find articles on improving your professional skills.
Flickr: Browse or search through content under each type of creative commons license.
Free images of global women: Library of images celebrating women’s lives and their work in 11 countries around the world
Gender Spectrum Collection: A stock photo library featuring images of
trans and non-binary models.
HEAL Health Education Assets Library: The Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) is a collection of over 22,000 freely available digital materials for health sciences education.
Getty Open Images: The Getty has provided over 110,000 images that are available for free download and use. They may be searched and browsed on their full database of images.
Gratisography: A quirky collection of free high-resolution pictures, all completely free to download without copyright restrictions.
Guide to the Public Domain: We've put together this page on the Public Domain and how to find images and artwork that are in the Public Domain. Included are several resources for searching and finding images that are in the Public Domain.
Kaboompics: Professional stock photo website complete with complementary color palettes and inspirational blog posts.
Life of Pix: A popular free photo resource, browsed by gallery or photographer.
The MET Public Domain Artworks: Explore public domain artworks from The Met's collection, licensed under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.
National Gallery of Art | NGA Images: The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has large, searchable online image collections. Limiting to "Open Access" images allows you to find images that can be freely used in publications and websites.
Negative Space: Beautiful, free high-resolution photos with no restrictions.
Pexels: Upload your own photos to share or browse high-resolution stock photos for free.
Pixabay: Photos, Illustrations, Vector Graphics, and Videos
SMK (National Gallery of Denmark): A selection of their 25,000 public domain images are available for high-resolution download on this page (instructions for proper usage and citation are provided). The museum has also made educational videos for these works.
Smithsonian Open Access: You can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from the Smithsonian collections.
Unsplash: Over 1 million photos that can be freely downloaded and used for either commercial and non-commercial purposes, no permission needed (though attribution is appreciated!).
dig.cc.Mixter: Either search for music in the search box on the top right or browse by clicking "Dig!" for Instrumental Music for Film & Video, Free Music for Commercial Project, or Music for Video Games.
Free Loops: Offers a variety of free sound effects, vocal loops, drum loops and more.
Free Music Archive: Browse and download music from various genres; while the majority of content is CC licensed, some music will not be.
Jamendo: Songs by musicians who want to share their music.
Mutopia Project: Sheet music for Baroque, Classical, Folk, Gospel, Hymn, Jazz, March, Modern, Popular / Dance, Renaissance, Romantic, Song, and Technique.
Sound Bible: A collection of sound effect audio files, many licensed under an Attribution 3.0 License.
UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive: Recorded Audio
What Funk: House, electronic, techno, electronica, hip-hop, cinematic, pop music published on Whatfunk can be used for free, for commercial and non-commercial commercial purposes.
Academic Earth: Find lectures and videos from some of the most respected instructors in the world.
Coverr: All videos published on Coverr.co can be used for free. You can use them for commercial and noncommercial purposes. Read the Licensing and FAQ page for more info.
Crash Course Video Library: High-quality educational videos.
HippoCampus: Thousands of free videos for Algebra, Arithmetic, Biology, Calculus & Advanced Math, Chemistry, Earth Science, Economics, English, Geometry, Government, History, Physics, Probability, Religion, Sociology, and Statistics.
Khan Academy: Hundreds of short educational videos covering many subjects; especially strong collections in science and math.
Life of Vids: Royalty-free videos, loops and clips that can be shared, embedded and used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.
Mazwai: Original video footage; you must credit the author and abide by the CC license on each work.
NOVA: In-depth science programming in the form of one-hour documentaries and long-form mini-series, from the latest breakthroughs in technology to the deepest mysteries of the natural world.
OCW Utah: Open education course materials aimed at a high school level.
Pexels Video: A collection of free downloadable stock videos licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means you can edit or change the videos and use them for personal and even for commercial projects.
Pixabay: Photos, Illustrations, Vector Graphics, and Videos
TEDMED videos: Provides video presentations from 2009 to the present about health and medicine.
Videvo: Free HD stock footage of motion graphics that can be used for any project. Video clips are licensed in one of two ways: their own Videvo Standard License, or the Creative Commons 3.0 license.
Vidlery: Free animated backgrounds licensed under CC0 1.0
Vidsplay: Stock video footage can be used for both personal and commercial projects at no cost. You are free to download, edit, and remix the videos with the requirement that a credit link to Vidsplay.com be displayed.
Vimeo: In Vimeo, perform a search for your topic (use quotation marks to search as a phrase).
After you receive your search results, you will have limiters on the left hand side of the screen.
Click on “+ More filters” to expand the list of limiters.
At the bottom should be “License.” There are 7 Creative Commons licenses listed. Unfortunately, Vimeo will make you search each license separately. You can use any of the licenses if you’re just posting the video. If you are planning on making changes to the video, then it’s more important to pick the right CC license.
Workforce Training Materials (via SkillsCommons): Skillscommons is a free and open digital library of Workforce Training Materials.
YouTube: In YouTube, perform a search for your topic (use quotation marks to search as a phrase).
After you search, click “Filters.” Under “Features,” select “Creative Commons.” This will limit the search to open access videos.
Concord Consortium: Interactive STEM activities.
eduMedia: Science in action.
LabXchange: A free online platform for science education from Harvard University.
Molecular Workbench: Standalone program for visual, interactive simulations for teaching and learning science.
National Science Digital Library: Serving science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education
PBS NOVA Interactives: To access the interactive labs, navigate to a topic page and in the "filter by" box, select "explore." If visiting multiple topics, the page needs to be refreshed for the filter to work correctly.
PhET Interactive Simulations: Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, and Math Simulations
Wisc-Online: A repository of learning objects.
Avida-ED: Allows students to design and perform experiments to test hypotheses about evolutionary mechanisms using evolving digital organisms.
Biology Simulations: Simulations to help students learn about biology and practice data analysis skills.
Bioman Biology: BioMan Biology is a fun place to learn Biology! Here you will find learning games, review games, virtual labs and quizzes that will help you to learn about cells, ecology, genetics, physiology, and much more!
Build Your Own Brain (BYOB): An online game that lets the user build a simple network of neurons and see how they might function.
Case It!: Molecular biology simulations for case-based learning in biology.
DNA from the Beginning: An animated primer of 75 experiments that made modern genetics.
eSkeletons: Provides an interactive environment in which to examine and learn about skeletal anatomy.
Evo Ed: Case studies in evolution that track the development of traits from their origination in DNA mutation, to the production of different proteins, to the fixation of alternate macroscopic phenotypes in reproductively isolated populations.
Gelbox: Open source interactive simulation tool for gel electrophoresis.
General Microbiology Labs: Labs and lectures on microbiology from the University of Wyoming.
Geniventure: Students level up as they select alleles to control phenotypes, make predictions from genotypes, use meiosis to create gametes, and study inheritance by breeding baby drakes.
HHMI BioInteractive: Labs, interactive media, and videos. Also offers iOS apps.
Learn.Genetics: Offers online lessons in genetics, cell biology, evolution, human health, plant biology, neuroscience, and ecology. Also offers interactive genetics labs.
NAVS Online Dissection Resources: Curated list of virtual dissection labs and simulations from the National Anti-Vivisection Society.
NCEP Resources for Conservation Educators and Practitioners: Open access, electronic resources for conservation educators and trainers. They include diverse topics in conservation science and are designed for the post-secondary level.
Neuroscience in the time of Corona: Crowd-sourced compendium of resources for teaching neuroscience.
Nursing Assistant Resources: Virtual Dissection: Virtual dissection labs for studying human and animal anatomy and physiology.
Optical Microscopy Primer: Virtual microscopes that offer lessons in specimen focus, illumination intensity, magnification, and translation.
QUBES: Virtual labs and simulations for teaching quantitative biology.
Science Bank Online Dissection Resources: Virtual dissection resources.
SOFA: Open-source platform for physics and medical based simulation software.
StarGenetics: Mendelian genetics cross simulator. Allows students to simulate mating experiments between organisms that are genetically different across a range of traits to analyze the nature of the traits in question.
Virtual Fetal Pig Dissection: Supplement to laboratory dissections exploring introductory mammalian anatomy and physiology.
Whole Frog Project:Provides the ability to explore the anatomy of a frog by using data from high resolution MRI imaging and mechanical sectioning, together with 3D surface and volume rendering software.
ActivEpi: An electronic textbook for teaching epidemiology.
Community Health Nursing: Resources for the Community Nursing Diagnosis Assessment.
Health Check Tools: MedlinePlus: "Assess your health with interactive tools such as calculators, quizzes, and questionnaires. You can check your risk for heart disease, calculate your ideal weight and body mass, find out how many calories your favorite exercise burns, and more."
Jim Allison: Breakthrough: Award winning documentary with accompanying toolkit and lesson plans.
MedlinePlus Interactive Health Games: Provided by MedlinePlus, "boost your health knowledge by playing with the 35 interactive health games."
MDCUNE: Modular Digital Course in Undergraduate Neuroscience Education (MDCUNE) provides completely digital, inquiry-based laboratory modules in neuroscience.
Nordic University Health Hub: Open Educational Resources on Health from Nordic universities.
Nursing - Wisc-Online OER: Interactive tutorials in the area of nursing. You will find 25 free learning objects that can help you learn, study, or teach Nursing.
Open Neuroscience Education: Labs, open data, and other resources for teaching neuroscience.
Public Health Image Library (PHIL): Offers an organized, universal electronic gateway to CDC's pictures.
Solve the Outbreak: Epidemiology simulation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Wisc-Online Nursing: A repository of learning objects.
Algodoo: Gives users the opportunity to play with physics. Use your own hands and simple drawing tools to design, construct and explore the world of physics.
Astro Simulations: Online implementation of several NAAP simulations from the Columbia University Center for Teaching and Learning.
Chem1 Virtual Textbook: Reference text for general chemistry.
CheMagic: Provides a virtual model kit, chemistry demonstration videos, and liberal arts chemistry essays.
ChemCollective: A collection of virtual labs, scenario-based learning activities, tutorials, and concept tests.
Chemix: Chemix is an online editor for drawing science lab diagrams and school experiment apparatus. The app provides easy sketching for both students and teachers.
ChemReaX: A chemical reaction modeling and simulation app.
ChemSims: Simulations from the National Science Foundation covering solubility, kinetics, atomic interactions, gas laws, equilibrium, acid base, photoelectric effect, and atomic emissions.
Digital Lab Techniques Manual: A series of videos designed to help users prepare for chemistry laboratory class.
Earthquake Simulator: Manipulate length, depth and slip, then predict magnitude and experiment (Flash required)
GEAS Project Astronomy Laboratory Exercises: Online exercises designed for distance learning. Includes archive of images and spectra as well as video tutorials.
Gizmos: Online simulations with instructor guides, prompts for students
goREACT: Create virtual chemical reactions.
The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science: Environmental Science online course text and a coordinated website which includes streamed video programs, five interactive simulations, background on the scientists who created the content and those whose research is documented, a professional development guide, and additional resources.
HTML5 Physics Simulations: Manipulate systems and experiment with climate change, motion, forces, gravity, momentum, energy, and rotation.
Jules Verne Voyager, Jr.: An interactive map developed by UNAVCO where users can add earthquakes, stress axes, volcanoes, or plate boundaries to the entire world or by country.
Mixed Reception: Students use molar mass calculations, the scientific method, and basic knowledge of chemical reactions to solve a murder mystery. Students interview suspects and gather evidence as they solve the case.
NC State Undergraduate Organic Chemistry Teaching Laboratories - S.M.A.R.T. Lab Videos: Students created videos teaching introductory organic chemistry lab techniques.
Nebraska Astronomy Applet Project: Simulations of a wide range of astronomical phenomena, organized into units of related simulations with readings.
Nuclear Reimagined Virtual Field Trip: Journey to the leading nuclear research facility in the country, Idaho National Laboratory. Step inside a nuclear reactor, explore unexpected careers in nuclear science, and see what the future may hold thanks to advances in nuclear capabilities.
Online Resources for Organic Chemistry: List of URLs to online animations, videos, simulations, & demos compiled by the chem ed and biochem ed communities.
Open Source Physics: Provides curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling. Computational physics and computer modeling provide students with new ways to understand, describe, explain, and predict physical phenomena.
oPhysics: A collection of interactive physics simulations.
Physical Geology 101 Lab Study Material: A handful of virtual labs with fillable worksheets and lab reports.
The Physics Aviary: Cross-platform, run-anywhere, programs to help physics students around the world master the big ideas in physics.
The Physics Classroom: Physics simulations, tutorials, and concept builders.
Physics Simulations: Interactive physics simulations.
PlanetMaker: Allows users to create and tweak their own planet using image textures and lighting.
Royal Society of Chemistry Education Resources: Resources to help teach chemistry for primary, secondary, and higher education.
Scilab: Open source software for numerical computation.
SDSS Skyserver Projects: Activities to examine many topics in astronomy including H-R diagrams, spectroscopies, galaxy classification, Hubble's Law, and more.
Teaching Geoscience Online: Geoscience lab activities.
Tutorial Materials and Resources by Professor Gary L. Bertrand: List of simulated experiments, self-tests, and tutorials.
Virtual Chemistry Experiments: A collection of interactive web-based chemistry tutorials.
Virtual Microscope: Allows users to examine and explore minerals and microscopic features of rocks, helping them to develop classification and identification skills without the need for high-cost microscopes and thin section preparation facilities.
AnyLogic: Simulation software that combines discrete event, system dynamics, and agent-based simulation methods so you can model any real-world system or process.
APA Online Psychology Laboratory: Offers interactive demonstrations and experiments as well as sample datasets.
Build Your Own Brain: Online simple neural network simulator for intro behavioral neuroscience (There are detailed help notes under the help menu. This website allows you to build and 'run' simple brain networks, as well as adding drugs and external stimuli)
iCivics: Designed to engage students in meaningful civic learning. Provides teachers with well-written, inventive, and free resources.