List of Resources

Open Educational Resources

Here is a full list of resources listed in the OER section of the website with a short explanation of each resource.

• BCcampus OpenEd
• Athabasca University
• Alberta Open Educational Resources
• OER Universitas (OERu)
• OER Commons
• MITOpenCourseWare
• openstax CNX formerly Connexions
• Open Learn
• Writing Commons
• Plos
• Open Yale Courses
• DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
• Digital Commons Network
• Saylor.org Academy
• Knowledge Unlatched
• BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
• Canadian Copyright Collection at the British Library
• The Metropolitan Museum of the Art
• National Gallery of Art | NGA Images
• Canadian Museum of Nature
• Europeana Collections
• Rijksmuseum
• European Southern Observatory (ESO)
• Google Images
• Pixabay
• Unsplash
• Wikimedia Commons
• Pond5
• Moving Image Archive
• Vimeo

BCcampus OpenEd

BCcampus OpenEd is a project that was created in Vancouver at the 2012 OpenEd Conference. It began with the B.C. Open Textbook Project which sought to create openly licensed textbooks to combat the high cost of textbooks for students. Currently, the project has created textbooks in 40 different subject areas.

License:

Athabasca University

Athabasca University is considered to be one of the leading institutions in the field of open educational resources. After the creation of the UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning (COL), Athabasca was named chair of OER. Through the commonwealth they created the OER Knowledge Cloud which is a searchable database of OER resources such as articles, reports, and books. In 2014 OER Knowledge Cloud won an Ace Award for its use of OER.

UNESCO, Knowledge Cloud License:
Athabasca License:

Alberta Open Educational Resources

In 2013 Alberta began the process of creating the Alberta Open Educational Resources initiative. This initiative was designed to increase affordability and access to students in university. The resources section of the website provides users with toolkits, webinars, and additional information on the advantages of OER. The repository section of their website provides a list of publications which are free to use and download.

License:

OER Universitas (OERu)

Oer Universitas is an organization dedicated to making higher education available to all members of society. They are an international organziation, but boast several partners from Canada. Their courses can be used for personal study or for gaining university credits as many of their courses are recognized by colleges and universities. They provide courses on a wide range of subjects and allow users to choose from a full course or a smaller micro-course.

License:

MITOpenCourseWare

From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, MITOpenCourseWare seeks to make course material from every course at MIT freely availble on the web. They provide a complete course package including syllabus, reading list, lecture notes or slides, and a list of assignments. The course material they provide is at both the undergraduate and graduate level. According to the statistics provided on the site, they receive over 2 million page visits each month. A video on their site describes the genesis and goals of the project.

License:

OpenStax CNX formerly Connexions

Openstax CNX was created at Rice University by Dr. Richard Baraniuk in 1999. His goal was to created an open space for user so learn through educationa material wthat was freely adapted and open to all. Along with allowing authors to create and share their work to be adapted by others, openstax CNX provides users with a series of textbooks in a wide range of subjects written by experts.

License:

Open Learn

Open Learn is a UK based site for OER that attempts to provide all users with access to educational resources. Their material can be viewed and consumed by subject or a user can access specific pieces of information, to brush up on specific areas. All of the content on the Open Learn site is licensed under at Creative Commons license, however, they retain copyright of specific portions of their website.

License:

Writing Commons

Writing Commons was created at the University of Souther Florida in 2008 by Joe Moxley. This resource provides users with a series of online textbooks on a wide variety of subjects.

License:

PLOS

Plos is a nonprofit open access publisher founded in 2001. Their stated mission is to "accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication." Their website provides a user with complete access to seven unique journals on subjects such as biology, medicine, and genetics.

License:

Open Yale Courses

Open Yale Courses is available through Yale University. This site includes multiple courses in a wide range of subjects which include African American Studies, Economics, and Political Science. A user can simply download a zip file which contains all of the course material they would need.

License:

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a database of scholarly journals which are open access. The DOAJ is supported by many of the major journal publishers and contains journals from the humanities, social sciences, and STEM subjects.

License:

Digital Commons Network

Digital Commons Network is a website which provides full-text access to many articles. The articles are on a wide range of subjects including law, arts and humanities, and engineering. The articles are presented on the webpage in a multicolored circle, with the inner most portion of the cirlce being top-level categories and the outer most portion being more specialized categories. The website also provides the option to search for specific articles. 

License: No license listed

Saylor.org Academy

Saylor.org Academy is a website which provides access to over 100 textbooks. These textbooks are available in three formats to download and topics encompass a wide range of subjects. Saylor.org encourages users to share and improve the textbooks they provide.

License:

Knowledge Unlatched

Knowledge Unlatched is a site which will provide access to journals and textbooks. The site, as of May 2017, is collection articles which will be open access and available to all users. The site provides a downloadable pdf which outlines their commitment to open publishing of journals. The site also contains over 300 textbooks which users can access using OAPEN Library.

License: No specific license listed

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)

Base is a search engine which contains over 100 Million documents. Base allows users to complete basic searches or advance searching depending on their knowledge and search skills. Although not all of the documents in the search engine are open access, over 60% are open access. Base is maintained by Bielefeld Universität which is located in Germany.

License: No license listed

Canadian Copyright Collection a the British Library

Within Wikimedia Commons there is a collection of images from Canada. This collection was owned by the British Library and contains over 4000 images taken between 1895 and 1924. There is a blog post describing the contents and origin of the collection through the website OpenGLAM.

License: Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In a blog post published in February of 2017, The Met announced they would be placing all of their public domain images under a Creative Commons CC0 license. This provides users with over 375,000 images which are now free to use.

License: Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain

National Gallery of Art | NGA Images

The National Gallery of Art has allowed over 45,000 of their images to be open access and available to anyone to use. They provide users with basic searching, as well as advanced searching, and the option to browse their continually updated feature image. The images in this collection are believed to be, by the NGA to be in the public domain. The NGA does not speak for entities or persons other than the NGA.

License: No Creative Commons license

Canadian Museum of Nature

In 2014 the Canadian Museum of Nature created an online database composed of  over 700,000 of their records. This database is free to use and provides a user with access to scientific data on plants, animals, fossils, and minerals.

License:

Europeana Collections

The Europeana Collections is a collection of material from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums from institutions in multiple European countries. Not all images in the collection are free to use. After completeing a search, limiters will appear as a sidebar on the results page, one limiter allows a user to limit results to only those which are free for reuse.

License: Multiple licenses with varying levels of openess

Rijksmuseum

The Rijksmuseum, a Dutch Museum located in Amesterdam, The Netherlands has opened their collection of images to the public. This intitiative was completed in conjunction with Europeana Collections. Their collection includes images of paintings by Dutch masters such as Vermeer and Rembrandt.

License: Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain

European Southern Observatory

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has a portion of their website devoted to images which are free to use. The images section of their website contains photographs related to space. Many of these are of stars, galaxies, and instruments on earth used to take photographs. The ESO has created a series of top-level categories which group the pictures by subject matter.

License:

Google Images

Through google images a user has the option to sort images based on their license. After completing an image search through google, a settings bar will appear below the google search box. In this bar there is a 'tools' button, after clicking this button a series of limiters will appear, including the option to limit your search by license.

License: Multiple licenses with varying levels of openess

Pixabay

Pixabay gives a user access to over 890,000 free photos licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 license. Pixabay allows for keyword searching and also provides a series of catagories to browse. Some images on the site are not licensed through Creative Commons and the owner has retained rights to the image. It is important to check the license on the image before using.

License: Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain License

Unsplash

Photos through Unsplash are licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 license. The site provides keyword searching and also provides curated collections of images.

License: Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain License

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is part of Wikimedia, the same company that owns wikipedia. The site contains over 37 million files which include image, sound, and video recordings. The site is designed to be similar to wikipedia and due to this the site is easy to navigate for those who have used wikipedia in the past.

License: Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0

Pond5

Pond5 is a site which provides a user access to thousands of videos which are in the public domain and free to use. Pond5 supports remixing of their content to create original content. The site also contains collections of audio files, images, and 3D models.

License: In Public Domain

Moving Image Archive

The Moving Image Archive within the larger Internet Archive is a collection of over 3 million video files. Internet Archive categorizes its videos into categories which allow for easy searching. Certain categories such as Sci-Fi/Horror and Comedy Films contains feature length films that are currently in the public domain. There are also a series of limiters which allow a user to execute a more focused search.

License: Several licenses to choose

Vimeo

Vimeo is an onlie video sharing site that user can upload content for others to view. Vimeo also maintains a Creative Commons section which contains videos which are licensed under the various Creative Commons licenses. This section allows users to resue, remix, and share videos freely.