Open Educational Resources (OER) at UVA

Textbooks

• The Pressbooks Directory includes all books (including textbooks, handbooks, and other text-based media) published on Pressbooks, a popular OER authoring tool.  You can also view UVA-created Pressbooks in our own catalog.  
   
• The Open Textbook Library is the best one-stop site for locating open textbooks.  The library includes textbook reviews from faculty across the nation.
   
• OpenStax has a selection of open textbooks aimed towards large enrollment courses.  In addition to free online texts, they also offer low-cost print copies that can be ordered.
   
• BCcampus Open Education offers a collection of hundreds of open textbooks created by faculty at institutions in British Columbia. 
   
• LibreTexts currently encompass twelve widely used college-level disciplines from chemistry to humanities with over 68,500 pages.
   
• Open SUNY Textbooks is an open textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants and SUNY Geneseo.
   
• Unlike some of the open textbook initiatives books from The National Academies Press are publicly available but not openly licensed.  You can link to the content, and even link directly to specific pages. However, you cannot remix and redistribute the content.

Ebooks
 

• DOAB
  The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books.
   
• The Digital Public Library of America
  The Digital Public Library of America aggregates openly-licensed books, making them available to libraries. Access more than 5,000 ebook titles–from the classics to contemporary fantasy and sci-fi–ALL FOR FREE by choosing DPLA as your library and tapping on the DPLA Collection. No sign in or library card required. To browse, use its free SimplyE app, available for iOS and Android.
   
• Hathi Trust Digital Library
  HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform that provides long-term preservation and access service for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
   
• OAPEN Library
  The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the areas of humanities and social sciences.  
   
• Open Culture
  Open Culture's blog formatted repository seeks to bring together free resources on culture and education.

Courseware

• The Open Course Library (OCL)
  The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of sharable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts.
   
• The Open Learning Initiative (OLI)
  The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is a grant-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University, offering online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach.  The aim is to create high-quality courses and contribute original research to improve learning and transform higher education.
   
• Open Yale Courses
  Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.  The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.
   
• Open Michigan
  Open Michigan enables the University of Michigan community to make the products of its research, teaching, and creative work available to the world beyond the campus.
   
• MIT Open Course Ware (OCW)
  MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
   
• Academic Earth
  Academic Earth offers videos and lectures from respected instructors throughout the world.
  
• Coursera
  Coursera offers a large library of material--some of which is open to re-use.
   
• edX
  Founded at Harvard University and MIT in 2012, edX is an online learning destination and MOOC provider, offering high-quality courses from the world's best universities and institutions to learners everywhere.

Syllabi
 

Open Syllabus

Open Syllabus is a non-profit research organization that collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support novel teaching and learning applications.  Open Syllabus helps instructors develop classes, libraries manage collections, and presses develop books.  It supports students and lifelong learners in their exploration of topics and fields.  It creates incentives for faculty to improve teaching materials and to use open licenses.  It supports work on aligning higher education with job market needs and on making student mobility easier.  It also challenges faculty and universities to work together to steward this important data resource.

Open Syllabus currently has a corpus of nine million English-language syllabi from 140 countries.  It uses machine learning and other techniques to extract citations, dates, fields, and other metadata from these documents.  The resulting data is made freely available via the Syllabus Explorer and for academic research. 

Syllabus Clearinghouse

The Syllabus Clearinghouse provides an open access resource for faculty looking to develop courses and/or improve a current course structure. The syllabi provided in the clearinghouse have been provided with the permission of the faculty member to be shared on this site as a resource.

Images

Featuring Inclusive Images  

• Allgo Plus-Size (CC-BY)

• American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action (CC-BY)

• Black Illustrations (3 free packs of editable images; CC-BY)

• Disabled and Here (CC-BY)

• Fresh Folk (CC-BY)

• Images of Empowerment (CC-BY-NC)

• Nappy (CC0)

• PICNOI (CC-BY)

• The Gender Spectrum (CC-BY-NC-ND)

• #WOCinTech Chat (CC-BY)

• Redefining Women – Icon Collection (CC0)
   

General openly licensed images

• CC Search

• Flickr

• Freepik

• Pexels

• Pixabay

• Public Domain Vectors

• Unsplash

• The Noun Project

• The Public Domain Review

• Wikimedia Commons
   

Create Your Own Images

• GIMP is a full-featured and open source image editing application with somewhat of a learning curve | GIMP tutorials.
• GIMPSHOP, also open source and built using GIMP code, is an image editing application resembling Photoshop.
• Greenshot is a free, open source tool for taking, editing, and annotating screenshots.
   

Remember the Golden Rule of Open - Attribution

Remember the one condition of open licenses: You must provide attribution.

Ideal attribution for images should include Title + Author (linked to their profile when possible) + Source (linked to it in the title) + License (link to license deed). As example, these are the attributions for images included in this page:

• "Untitled from the Gender Spectrum Collection" by Zackary Drucker is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND
• "Untitled from the Disabled And Here Collection" by Chona Kasinger is licensed under CC-BY
• "Untitled from the PICNOI Collection" by Brooke Cagle is licensed under CC-BY