Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) are free and publicly available teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

OER Examples:

instructors may download the material, tailor it to one's course, save a copy locally to share with one's students and share it back out with attribution.
Content includes textbooks, course materials or full courses, modules, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
An open source (or open) textbook is a textbook which is OER.

Open Educational Resources differ from library-licensed materials, which are free for library patrons but are not free—rather, they have been paid for by the library.

Open Access (OA) is a type of OER license for teaching, learning and research materials that are available free online for anyone to use, as-is, but they may not be revised, remixed, or redistributed. This terminology is typically used for scholarly works (journals, books, etc.), but can also refer to other class materials.

OA Examples:

Government documents
Articles from open access journals
Reports from think tanks.

Affordable Course Content describes any free, low-cost, or openly licensed educational resources that can serve as alternatives to high-cost resources. This content includes textbooks, digital courseware, course modules, videos, journal articles, and any other materials used to support learning. Most affordable course content still retains traditional copyright licensing, including restrictions on how a resource can be used or shared.

OERs for Research & Knowlege-Sharing

Internet Archive

A non-profit online library for free books, movies, software, music, websites and more resources.

Click this linked text to access the Internet Archive website.

Project Gutenberg

A library containing over 60,000 free ebooks. Click this link to access Project Gutenberg's website.

MERLOT

Access a wealth of online materials for learning, support materials, and tools for creating content. MERLOT provides an opportunity not only for educators to access content, but for educators to create content designed for their area of expertise or academic focus.

Click this link to access MERLOT's website.

Directory of Open Access Journals

The DOAJ contains almost 17500 peer-reviewed, open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Click to access the Directory of Open Access Journals

Creative Commons

This nonprofit "helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world's pressing challenges." Find photos, audio, links and more on the Creative Commons or Openverse web pages.

Click on this linked text to view the Creative Commons site. or you can visit the Downloads page to find downloadable images referencing various types of creative commons licensing. Use these images to provide guidance on how to properly reuse your content.

OER Classroom Technology Tools

This list of OER tech tools spans free to 'freemium.' Open access tools can improve learning environments by providing students with engaging ways to think about course material and interact with one another. Tool ideas are listed in function categories below.

Authoring Tools

Use Apple Pages (formerly iBooks Author) on Mac and iPad to create ebooks. Use a template or start from scratch to build an ebook. This tool is free and excellent to incorporate into a final project for a course.
Use Claude.ai (LLM AI tool) to assist with brainstorming, drafting and editing a final written product.

Mind Mapping

Mindmeister is a mind-mapping tool that allows you to brainstorm, take notes, plan a project, or connect big concepts through a term by building a visual map. This is a web-based, freemium tool that allows you to build up to 3 maps for free.
Create engaging group work using Stormboard. This tool allows teams up to 5 or fewer to collaborate.
Bubbl.us is a mind mapping tool that also allows up to 3 mind maps and has similar features to Mindmeister. Since freemium tools run out quickly, having a backup can be helpful!

Classroom Interaction

PollEverywhere allows you to post unlimited polling questions for respondent sizes less than 25.
Google Forms is free and easy to use at The Seattle School, given that everyone has their own Google account.
Quizlet allows you to create online quizzes for the purpose of study and assessment.
Kahoot has some free features for creating learning games at the higher education level. Paid plans are as low as $5 a month.

Collaboration

Google Docs allows collaborators to work together on a single document and tracks the history of work done on the document. Additionally, collaborators are able to revert to past versions of the document using the history tool.
Slack is a group chat and collaboration tool that allows users to message, meet, and discuss based on subgroups and/or users. Used primarily for work teams, Slack has also been used for classrooms to have organic conversations virtually at any time of day, without needing to log into the LMS. This tool is downloadable to mobile devices or accessed through a computer.
Trello is another collaboration tool used by work teams and organizations. It can be used in the classroom to manage group projects or oversee long-term subject discussions.

Portfolio & Presentation

Prezi is a fun tool for presentation creation that allows you to apply visually interesting transitions and design basics. Create 5 or fewer presentations for free or upgrade to Plus for a monthly fee.
Google Slides allows students to pull from their Google Drive, collaborate on slide creation, easily embed YouTube videos, and share, along with many other features. This is already a part of student learning tools since it is a part of the Google Suite.
Google Sites is another tool already available to students. While there are some creative restraints on site building, it is an intuitive tool that will allow students to build out a wiki page, a portfolio,
Weebly is a website-building tool that offers free domain hosting for your first year. Planning and building an informative and beautiful website is an important skill. Students can use this tool to present information as an alternative to slides or build a website as part of a creative final project (take what you’ve learned and create a website that aims to solve problem “x”).
Wix is another excellent website building tool that offers templates and a free website that includes the wix domain. This is a great resource for building an online portfolio or for class assignments.

Scanning Tools

iOS phones can scan documents using the Notes app. This feature is free for all iOS users.
Google Drive allows a user on a tablet, phone or other mobile device (with app installed) to scan a document directly to Google Drive.

Screen-Capture Tools

Google Vids is an AI-powered video creation app which can assist with design, videography, editing, and production. You can generate a fun and interesting lecture video from a series of prompts relating to styling, images, scripts, voice, music and effects. Vids also interacts seamlessly with existing content (e.g. Google slides) you might already have in drive.
TechSmith Screen Recorder(formerly Jing) is a free software which allows you to easily start recording on your browser.
On Mac: use keyboard shortcuts to screenshot or screen record
On PC: use keyboard shortcuts on Windows 10 devices to record screen. Screen capture can also be accessed with keyboard shortcuts

White Board Tools

Jamboard is a Google Tool that allows collaborators to work together on a whiteboard, but also allows an instructor to present the whiteboard for the purpose of demonstration.
Miro is a whiteboard tool that permits three editable boards at a time on their free version. Choose from templates or create your own.
Explain Everything also allows you to have up to 3 projects for free. There’s also a chat feature, sharing via web, and exporting up to 1 minute of video recording. Paid plans are as low as $7 per month.

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