JCU Library

Find & Access Guides

Skip to Main Content

Open Educational Resources (OER)

A curation of materials relating to Open Educational Resources and their use

Find OER in a curated collection

Below are some of the best large collections of OER that you can freely search, along with a brief summary:

Pressbooks Directory Pressbooks Directory - A searchable catalog of over 8,000 openly accessible books published by nearly 200 organisations using the Pressbooks platform. This is the platform currently being used to publish Open Textbooks at JCU.
OER Commons - Wikipedia OER Commons - Self described as a public digital library of OER, you can search the whole collection or browse curated collections within.
MERLOT - Merlot stands for ''Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching'' and contains a variety of textbooks and other learning resources, including lesson plans, activities, tests, articles and much more. It currently curates upwards of 100,000 individual open resources.
OASIS - Openly Available Sources Integrated Search, or OASIS, is a federated search tool that simultaneously searches over 117 repositories for OER. 
Openstax - Openstax is the world's largest publisher of OER, and their website contains a collection of high quality textbooks and learning materials for core subjects in primary, secondary and tertiary educational landscapes. The resources may be viewed freely online or download freely once you sign up for a free account.
Open Textbook Library Open Textbook Library - Collection of openly licensed textbooks and supplementary resources, supported by the Open Education Network.

Find OER at JCU

One Search has an option to limit your results to open access

1. Go to One Search
2. Enter your search terms
3. Click Search
4. On the results page, select the Open Access filter
5. Click Apply Filters

You can also limit to particular Content types, such as book, video, images, audio and more by clicking on Content Type. 

 

JCU discovery collection thumbnailJCU Open Educational Resources Discovery Collection: A collection of high quality open books from Australia and beyond, carefully selected by our Liaison Librarian team and arranged by subject area.

JCU Open Ebooks Collection

JCU Open Ebooks

Find content you can reuse in an OER

  • Unsplash - photos and stock images with no license restrictions
  • Pexels - photos and stock images with no license restrictions
  • Pixabay - photos and stock images with no license restrictions
  • Library of Congress Free to Use and Reuse Sets - items from the library's digital collection that are free to use in any way, being either in the public domain or having no known copyright restrictions.
  • Life of Pix - high resolution photography with no copyright restrictions on commercial reuse
  • Burst
  • Open Clipart
  • Openverse - also contains audio and video. Most images will be free to reuse and adapt in any way (including commercially) but you should check the individual license conditions on each image or media item.
  • Wikimedia Commons - also contains audio and video. Most images will be free to reuse and adapt but you should check the individual license conditions on each image or media item.
  • Flickr - filter to find creative commons images in an advanced search
  • Mixkit - high resolution videos with no license restrictions.
  • Coverr - also contains audio. Stock video footage with no license restrictions.
  • Vimeo - use filters to find creative commons videos in a search.
  • Openverse - also contains audio and images. Most video will be free to reuse and adapt in any way (including commercially) but you should check the individual license conditions on each image or media item.
  • Wikimedia Commons - also contains audio and images. Most video will be free to reuse and adapt but you should check the individual license conditions on each image or media item.
  • Jamendo - contains a section of royalty free music with no license restrictions.
  • Free Music Archive - contains a section of royalty free music with no license restrictions.
  • Coverr - also contains video. Royalty free audio with no license restrictions.
  • Openverse - also contains video and images. Most audio will be free to reuse and adapt in any way (including commercially) but you should check the individual license conditions on each image or media item.
  • Wikimedia Commons - also contains video and images. Most audio will be free to reuse and adapt but you should check the individual license conditions on each image or media item.

The Creative Commons Website provides and extensive advice on searching for openly licensed materials in google, youtube and many other platforms.

Help with finding OER

You can connect with our Open Education Team at any time for advice on locating OER or openly licensed elements for creating OER.

We acknowledge the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of the nation and acknowledge Traditional Owners of the lands where our staff and students, live, learn and work.Acknowledgement of Country

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International License, unless otherwise noted. Content from this Guide should be attributed to James Cook University Library. This does not apply to images, third party material (seek permission from the original owner) or any logos or insignia belonging to JCU or other bodies, which remain All Rights Reserved.

.