LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: Finding OER

Open Image & Media Collections

Need images and other media to include in your own OER, presentations, publications, and more? Search the repositories below for access to millions of objects that can be used freely with proper attribution.

AllGo Plus-Size Photos featuring plus-size models by Michael Poley of Poley Creative for AllGo, publisher of free stock photos featuring plus-size people.
Black Illustrations A collection of categorized illustrations of Black people. Some collections are free, some are for purchase.
Creative Commons LibGuide The CC LibGuide has additional options for places to find CC licensed works.
Disabled And Here Disabled And Here is a photo and interview series celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC).
EDUimages A free library of photos celebrating students and the educators who teach them in seven schools across the US. Licenced: CC BY-NC 4.0
Flickr Commons The Flickr Commons is for photos from institutions that want to share their digital collections in the public domain.
The Gender Spectrum Collection The Gender Spectrum Collection is a stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models.
Images of Empowerment A free library of images celebrating women’s lives and their work in 11 countries around the world
Nappy Beautiful photos of Black and Brown people, for free.
The Noun Project Comprehensive icon collection, most available for free use with attribution
Open Peeps The library works like building blocks made of vector arms, legs, and emotions. You can mix these elements to create different and diverse Peeps.
Openverse You can find over 500 million openly licensed images in Creative Commons, available for your reuse in all kinds of OER (with proper attribution).
Pexels Pexels is a website with more than 3 million free, open (Pexels license), high-resolution photos and videos.
PICNOI Free stock photos featuring images of people of color
PIXNIO Pixnio is a site with free, high quality public domain images that are tagged and categorized.
Public Domain Vectors Public Domain Vectors has a massive collection of openly-licensed vector graphics that are available to download in SVG, AI, and EPS formats.
Smithsonian Open Access Download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images
Unsplash Unsplash is a website dedicated to sharing stock photography under the Unsplash license.
Wikimedia Commons WikiMedia Commons is a collection of almost 80 million freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

OER Repositories

In these repositories, you can find OER created by others and ready for your use or adaptation, including textbooks, lesson plans, syllabi, videos, images, and more. Browse these repositories by subject or search for materials using relevant keywords.

Repository	Pros	Cons
OER Commons	One of the largest OER repositories Covers multiple disciplines Allows for sorting by education level, reuse options, and by standard	Rating system is a bit unclear
OERTX	New OER repository from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Covers multiple disciplines Allows for sorting by education level, reuse options, and by standard	Covers most of the same resources as OER Commons since the platform is shared Rating system is a bit unclear
OpenStax	High quality textbooks for introductory level college courses	Little content for upper level courses Not much coverage in the humanities
Open Textbook Library	Large collection of textbooks with published peer reviews by professors Includes some upper level/graduate textbooks Easy to use interface	As the name suggests, the content is limited to textbooks
MERLOT II	Lots of filtering and limiting options when searching Wide range of disciplines represented Wide variety of material types	Search interface is a bit clunky
OASIS	Searches content from over 60 different sources, you can sort by license type and type of resource.	Can't sort by education level
OER Metafinder	Simultaneously searches multiple repositories, could give you good ideas of other repositories to look in	Search interface is difficult to use Search results sometimes take you to the main page of different repository and then you have to redo your search Not easy to determine licenses for items

Discipline-Specific Repositories

These repositories are spaces that allow you to submit your own OER through mediated or unmediated means.

Humanities

LACLI (Latin American, Caribbean, U.S. Latinx, and Iberian)
Humanities Commons

Social Sciences

Society for the Teaching of Psychology

STEM

nanoHUB (Nanotechnology, Materials Science)
National Science Digital Library
QUBES
SIMIODE (Differential Equations)
VIPEr (Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource [Inorganic Chemistry])

Looking for supplemental materials?

If you're interested in finding open materials that might be relevant to a text you're teaching, try using MERLOT II's ISBN search function. Just input the ISBN of the text you're currently using to see what materials could be supplemental.

How can the Libraries help?

Librarians can help you find OER suited to your course needs. We'll consult with you to understand your learning objectives, current course materials, and student needs to inform our search together.

You can fill out this form to initiate a request for reviews of existing free and affordable course materials.

Discipline-Specific OER

Many other libraries have curated lists and guides to existing discipline-specific OER. We invite you to review those below -- or, better yet, just ask us for help finding what you need! Librarians can compile guides to OER customized to your course.

Open Syllabus Banks

Want to find an openly licensed syllabus or share your own? The OER repositories on the left accept syllabi and are a great place to find them. There are also a few discipline-specific syllabus banks that might be relevant to your course: