OER Tools and Resources

Copyright & LicensingMan working at laptop

Creative Commons provides free, easy-to-use copyright licenses designed to make a simple and standardized way to give the public permission to share and use creative work.

Teaching Resources

The OEI has developed and produced over two dozen sample course shells with embedded OER, along with a shell just waiting for you to enter your OER or commercial textbook. From Canvas Commons, Search “CCC OEI” to view and download those shells. These shells are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license and are aligned with the OEI Course Design Rubric. These course shells could be a foundation for your online or hybrid courses. They could also be used in your face-to-face courses with a Canvas presence.

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is a consortium of community and technical colleges committed to expanding access to education and increasing student success through adoption of open educational policy, practices, and resources. CCCOER also provides the Five Steps to OER Adoption.

California Community Colleges Vision Resource Center provides professional development resources for CCC faculty and staff across a range of topics.

OER Commons is a comprehensive online resource for identifying and adopting high-quality OER resources and solutions.

Open Washington is another comprehensive resource for OER course materials, textbooks, and audiovisual files.

Repositories & Content

California Open Online Library for Education (Cool4Ed) is a partnership between California Community Colleges, The California State University, and University of California providing OER textbooks, course materials, online courses, and open access journals and articles.

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is a consortium of community and technical colleges committed to expanding access to education and increasing student success through adoption of open educational policy, practices, and resources.

OER Commons is a comprehensive online resource for identifying and adopting high-quality OER resources and solutions.

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning & Online Teaching (MERLOT) is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.

OpenStax is a non-profit operating from Rice University which provides a comprehensive repository of OER.

Skills Commons is an OER library of Workforce Training Materials provided by the U.S. Department of Labor. Skills Commons also offers a Basic Skills Career Technical Education (CTE) Faculty Handbook.

BC Campus provides a library of CTE OER Textbooks & Materials (select “Trades” from left-hand navigation).

Play the Textbook Challenge Game (click on the icon below).

Affordable Textbook Challenge LOGO