Education Consultancy | Department for Education Innovation | University of Pretoria
Another way of organizing or categorizing OER is according to the level of functionality offered by the OER website. For example:
Of course, some organisations and institutions offer combinations of the above functionality, so it is quite possible to find a mix of these functions available within the same OER web site. The following table identifies a few examples of directories, platforms, and repositories. It is worth investing some time to familiarise yourself with the different types of OER offered by each.
| Name | Information |
|---|---|
| Abstruse Goose | Archive of comic strips. |
| Academic Earth | A curated collection of free online courses from the world’s top universities. |
| African Health OER Network | Health education resources to advance health education in Africa. |
| AfriVIP | OER for veterinary and para veterinary professionals and students, farmers, agri-businesses, governments, NGOs, and other key stakeholders in Africa. |
| Alexandria Archive Institute | An open access resource for the electronic publication of primary field research from archaeology and related disciplines. |
| Aljazeera creative commons repository | Broadcast media that Al Jazeera has released under various Creative Commons licenses. |
| AMSER | Applied Math and Science Education educational resources. |
| Ariadne | It is a proposal to integrate existing archeological data infrastructure across Europe, so researchers can use the various distributed datasets and new technologies to explore research methodologies. |
| ArtxHistory | A collection of Art History resources under creative commons licenses. |
| BBC Creative Archive | A single, shared user licence scheme for downloading moving images, audio and stills and it applies strict, non-commercial, rules for its use. |
| BC Campus OpenEd | A collection of 385 high quality open textbooks for a wide range of disciplines. |
| Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) | Academic search engin. |
| Big Academic Alliance | Sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources, and collaborating on innovative programmes. |
| Blended learning resources | A range of resources for online and blended learning. |
| CALI | CALI (Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction) is a consortium of law schools, law libraries, and related institutions which work in the area of legal education creating openly available tools and resources. |
| CChemCollective | Online resources for teaching and learning Chemistry. |
| Center for Open Education | A source of openly licensed textbooks available for anyone to download and use for free. |
| clker | Free clip art. |
| COERLL | The Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) is a National Foreign Language Resource Center situated in the US that wants to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages. |
| Commonwealth of Learning | Resources for distance education and open learning. |
| Compfight | An image search tool developed to “locate images for blogs, comps, inspiration, and research". |
| Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) | Provides resources, support, and opportunities for collaboration for learning, planning, and implementing successful open educational programs at community and technical colleges. |
| Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education | Resources for members of the undergraduate statistics education community. |
| Creative Commons licensing | Creative Commons licensing platform. |
| Creativity103 | A library of free abstract backgrounds, textures and design ideas. |
| Digital Library for Earth System Education | Searchable access to high-quality, online educational resources for K-12 and undergraduate Earth System Science education. |
| Digital Literacy OER | Hokkaido University's and Adobe's OER for teaching digital literacy in higher education. |
| Digital Public Library of America | Empowers people to learn, grow, and contribute to a diverse and better-functioning society. |
| Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) | Oeer reviewed open access books and book publishers that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed books. |
| Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) | Research articles in a broad range of subjects. |
| DiscoverEd | A search engin developed by Creative Commons to explore metadata enhanced search, specifically for OER. |
| DOER – Directory of Open Educational Resources | Open Educational Resources from Commonwealth universities and educational institutions. |
| dryicons | Free vector icons. |
| DUDA | Supplement for homework help and teaching in primary and lower secondary education. |
| Economics Network Online Learning and Teaching Materials | Educational resources for economics teaching and learning. |
| Educar Chile | Classroom resources. |
| Eduteka | An educational portal dedicated to improving the quality of basic and secondary education. |
| eGyankosh | A digital repository of the learning resources developed by the Indian Open and Distance Learning Institutions. |
| EMU Danmarks lærninrsportal | . |
| EveryStockPhoto | Free stock photos. |
| Exemplary collection of open eLearning content repositories | Exemplary collection of open eLearning content repositories. |
| flickr | Online photo management and sharing application. |
| flickr Commons | Contribute to the world's public photography archives. |
| Fort Awesome | Browse and manage icons and typefaces. |
| FREIburger Multimedia Object Repository | Follow the references to access information. |
| FundaOER | A collection of free and open resources to providers of both pre-service and in-service teachers. |
| Google Advanced Search | Allows the user to adjust the usage rights field to receive results that include only OER. |
| Google Images | Use the "Usage Rights" pull down list to search for open content. |
| Google OCW/OER search | Customised search. |
| Hum Box | Humanities teaching resources. |
| I-Berry | Resources about environment issues. |
| Ilumina | A library of undergraduate teaching materials for chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science. |
| InTech | Science, technology, and medicine open access book collection. |
| Internet Archive | A library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. |
| ITSON repositorio de objetos de aprendizaje | Resources for the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT's) within curricular programs. |
| Khan Academy | Offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace. |
| KNUST | OER to maximise the impact of KNUST's work in an African context. |
| Kursnavet | A digital learning resource bank on the internet freely available to everyone. |
| LibreTexts | An internet library of free and open-source educational resources. |
| Lifewire | Find free textbooks. |
| Live Lingua | A collection of US Government created public domain language eBooks and a/v resources for almost every language. |
| Liverpool University Press | A collection of open access books. |
| Lumen Learning | OER course materials and tools. |
| Luminos | The Open Access (OA) publishing program for the University of California Press. It makes digital editions of scholarly books available free of charge. |
| Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) | George Mason University's real-time, simultaneous search of open educational materials. |
| Matematikk | OER resources for school. |
| MathWorld | A free resource from Wolfram Research. |
| Merlot | Curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools. |
| Merlot X | Free online textbooks. |
| Milne Open Textbooks | A catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff. |
| MIT Open CourseWare | A repository of MIT course materials. It includes course schedules, lecture notes/texts, tests and solutions, and student work exemplars from a wide range of courses. |
| MorgueFile | Free stock photos. |
| Multimedia Training Videos | Free and open educational resources for instruction in the use of a variety of multimedia and ICT tools. |
| My Open Math | An online course management and assessment system for mathematics and other quantitative fields. They also recommend several open textbooks in various areas on "opentextbookstore.com". |
| National Digital Learning Resources Network | Sharing of digital resources through education portals. |
| NLDA | Open learning resources for upper secondary education in Norway. |
| Noba Project | Open, shareable, and adaptable education materials across the field of psychology. |
| Noun Project | Free public domain icons. |
| OAPEN | A collection of open access books. |
| OER4 | Open learning and educational resources. |
| OER-CODEX | OER course modules conveying digital teaching and learning methods including online collaborative learning in a blended learning context for educators in Higher Education. |
| OER Commons | High-quality OER. |
| OER Commons Curated Collections | Digital library offerings. |
| OER Courses | Rhode Island College OER courses. |
| OER Encyclopedia | Index of OER. |
| OER Knowledge Cloud | A curated database and repository to identify, collect, preserve and disseminate documents related to open educational resources. |
| OERu | An education platform offering a number of MOOC-type, university-level courses and programmes. |
| Open Access eBooks | It covers different disciplines of science, technology and medicine. |
| Open Book Publishers | High-quality and prize-winning research availabale to all. |
| openclipart | Free clipart. |
| Open Content Alliance | An archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. |
| Open Course Library | A collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments. |
| #OpenCourseWare | An open and free e-learning platform for individual learners and educational institutes with free integrated textbooks and completion certificates. |
| Open Culture | A collection of free cultural and educational media. |
| OpenDOAR | The quality-assured, global Directory of Open Access Repositories. |
| Open.Ed | Open educational resources of the University of Edinburgh. |
| Open Education Consortium | OEC works with its members to build capacity to find, reuse, create and share Open Educational Resources (OER), develop open policy, create sustainable open education models, and enable international collaboration and innovation. |
| Open Education Week | Collection of open assets shared by the Open Week community. |
| Open Educational Resources (OER) Africa | OER resources and information. |
| Open Educational Resources for Typography | Open Educational Resources for Typography. |
| opengraphicdesign | Free graphics. |
| OpenLearn | Free OpenLearn courses that cover a wide range of subjects taught across the Open University curriculum. |
| OpenLearn Create | Open educational platform where individuals and organisations can publish their open content, open courses and resources. |
| Open Learning Initiative | Open courses from Carnegie Mellon University. |
| OpenLearnWare | Free learning resources. |
| Open Library | An open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published. |
| Open Michigan | A repository of materials from a range of university courses, covering many subjects. |
| Open Oregon Educational Resources | Open, low-cost, high-quality materials. |
| Open Research Library | A hosting platform for open access books. |
| Open Science Resources | Open science resources. |
| Open Science - UNESCO | Making the scientific process more transparent, inclusive and democratic. |
| Open Social Work | Open access books for Social Work. |
| OpenStax | Free textbooks and resources. |
| OpenStax Connexions | OpenStax high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks. |
| Open Textbook Library | A source of openly licensed textbooks available for anyone to download and use for free. |
| Open UCT | The open access institutional repository of the University of Cape Town. |
| Open University Courses | A free learning platform, delivered by The Open University. |
| Openverse | A customisable search engine designed and hosted by Creative Commons that offers image, media, video, music, and web content search tools. |
| Organic Education Network | Initiatives and experiments of forest management and preservation. |
| Pexels | Free stock photos, royalty free images and videos. |
| Phet (Physics Education Technology) | Free, interactive, research-based science and mathematics simulations. |
| Pics4Learning | A curated image library that is free for education. |
| Pixabay | Free stock photos. |
| Procomón | Network of Open Educational Resources. |
| Project Gutenberg | Free eBooks library. |
| Project MUSE | Search openly available content. |
| Public Library of Science (PLoS) | Scientific research journal articles. |
| Purdue University Press eBooks Old | A collection of books published as Open Access PDFs. These titles are free to read online, download, and print. |
| Radical in Progress | An educational website providing free study guides of must-read social justice literature. |
| Redined | An educational information network that offers bibliographic records and full-text documents of research, innovations and educational resources produced in Spain. |
| Restore | A repository of online research methods resources. |
| RRU Open Educational Resources | Royal Roads University Open Educational Resources. |
| Saylor Academy | A collection of post-secondary short courses across a wide range of subjects. |
| Siyavula | A collection of open textbooks for primary and secondary school subjects, including mathematics, physical science, natural science and technology. The content is offered as textbooks and/or online interactive resources. |
| Skolresurser | Open education portal for the folk school. |
| SmartHistory | A center for public art history with free videos and essays. |
| Springer Nature | Springer open access books. |
| Stanford History Education Group: OER Projects | An award-winning research and development group seeking to improve education by conducting research, working with schools, and reaching into classrooms with free materials. |
| Teaching Commons | High-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. It includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more. |
| The American Yawp | A collaborative US history textbook. |
| The world lecture project | International archive for academic videos. |
| UNESCO Digital Library | Access to publications, documents and other materials either produced by UNESCO or pertaining to UNESCO’s fields of competence. |
| UNITRACC | Course material on pipeline construction, pipeline maintenance, pipeline rehabilitation, and pipeline management. |
| University of British Columbia Open Case Studies | Brings together university teachers and students from different disciplines to write, edit, and learn with case studies that are free and licensed to allow others to revise and reuse them. |
| University of California Press, eBook Collection 1982-2004 | Collection contains almost 2,000 electronic editions of academic books, more than 25 percent of which are available for free to the public. |
| University of Cape Town | Open Access Monographs |
| University of Connecticut | Library research guide. |
| University of Pittsburgh Press, Digital Editions | Make books published by the Press available online. |
| University of the Witwatersrand | Library research guide. |
| UNM Digital Repository | Scholarship, research and cultural works created by the University of New Mexico staff, academics and students within their departments, centres and programs. |
| U-now Open Courseware Nottingham | A collection of university courses covering many subjects from the University of Nottingham, UK. |
| Unsplash | Free images. |
| WAC Clearinghouse | Open access textbooks on writing in scholarly communication. |
| Wellcome Collection | Creative Commons licensed images, mainly science-related. |
| WikiEducator | Provides an online environment for authoring new resources. |
| Wikimedia | Free educational content. |
| Wikipedia | A platform for collaborative writing. The entries have been written and peer-reviewed by members of the public. All entries are licensed as CC BY-SA. |
| WikiVet | A collection of online veterinary educational resources. |
| Wikiwijs | A public place from the Netherlands where you can search, create and share open teaching materials. |
| Wisconsin Online Resource Center | A library of learning objects freely available to anyone. |
| World Digital Library | A collection of digital books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photographs, sound recordings, and films. |
| World History Sources | Free history resources. |
| Xpert | Resources from the University of Nottingham. |
| ZUM-Teaching | An open, non-commercial platform for teaching materials and ideas. |
You are welcome to read the following resources.
Education Consultancy | Department for Education Innovation | University of Pretoria