Open Educational Resources 📚 | Waubonsee Community College

About OER

Open Educational Resources (OER) are open license and publicly available materials for education. As the Affordable College Textbook Act was introduced, a few OER projects were initiated and funded through the U.S. Department of Education. These materials are available for anyone to use. Some resources also allow users to improve and even redistribute the resources under a Creative Commons license.

OER have gained momentum with more funding opportunities in recent years. This growth is evident from Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. Research has shown that there have been no differences in learning efficacy between OER and commercial textbooks. However, the withdrawal rate for courses using OER is significantly lower.^₁ Research at Triton College has shown that even a single program adopting OER saves their students over $200,000 a semester.

Many educators, from kindergarten to higher education, have been moving away from traditional textbooks and introducing different forms of free course materials in the classroom. Subsequently, the quality and usability of these contents have been gradually improved. It also further addresses digital accessibility.

The Waubonsee Community College Library also has a robust collection of digital OER resources available for use.

Interested in OER? Explore the resources below and press Get Started 📧 to be connected with faculty currently using OER and other college OER resources!

OER Resources

AMSER	Applied Math and Science Education Repository
BCcampus	Higher Education - B.C., Canada
CMU Open Learning Initiative	Carnegie Mellon University
GALILEO Open Learning Materials	University System of Georgia
JHSPH OpenCourseWare	Johns Hopkins University
Learn OER	Austin Community College
Mason OER Metafinder	George Mason University
MERLOT	California State University
MIT OpenCourseWare	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
OER@AVU	African Virtual University
OER Commons	K-16
Open Course Library	Washington State Board
Open Culture	Cultural & Educational Media
OpenStax	Rice University
Open Textbook Library	University of Minnesota
Saylor Academy Open Textbooks	Saylor Academy
Stanford Open Learning Initiative	Stanford University
The OER Starter Kit	Iowa State University
The OER Starter Kit Workbook	City University of New York
TU Delft OpenCourseWare	Delft University of Technology
UMass Boston OpenCourseWare	University of Massachusetts Boston
World Digital Library	U.S. Library of Congress / UNESCO

Get Started! 📧

^₁Clinton, Virginia & Khan, Shafiq. (2019). Efficacy of Open Textbook Adoption on Learning Performance and Course Withdrawal Rates: A Meta-Analysis. AERA Open. 5. 233285841987221. 10.1177/2332858419872212.