Low-Cost, No-Cost, and Open Educational Resources (OER)

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is an intergovernmental organization created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning/distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.

Curriki’s mission is to make education more equitable through their global Open Educational Resource (OER) community of educators, parents, and students, which will enable teachers to make learning more personalized and help students reach their full potential.

OER Africa is an initiative established by the South African Institute for Distance Education (Saide). Its mission is to establish dynamic networks of African OER practitioners by sensitizing and connecting like-minded educators to develop, share, and adapt OER to meet the education needs of African Societies.

OEC is a global network of educational institutions, individuals, and organizations that support an approach to education based on openness, including collaboration, innovation, and collective development and use of open educational materials. The OEC is a non-profit, social benefit organization registered in the United States and operating worldwide.

Helps higher education institutions and systems advance the use of open textbooks and practices on their campuses. Has a large Network of Members). They maintain the Open Textbook Library.

The mission of the Open Policy Network is to foster the creation, adoption and implementation of open policies and practices that advance the public good by supporting open policy advocates, organizations and policy makers, connecting open policy opportunities with assistance, and sharing open policy information.

Many educators are simply looking for individual media elements to use within their courses, such as photos, graphics, videos, and audio, that are openly licensed in a way that freely permits education use. This resource will help you find openly licensed media elements to use within your courses.

Based at Rice University, OpenStax publishes openly licensed college textbooks and works with institutions to increase OER impacts.

SPARC is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. This organization includes open access initiatives.

WikiEducator is a community that plans education projects, develops free content, helps in the creations of OERs, and provides networking for funding proposals.

Connect OER is a platform to share and discover information about OER activities at campuses across North America. Each participating institution maintains a profile page about local OER activities, which collectively populate a searchable directory that showcases trends, best practices, and collective impact being achieved through OER.

Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) is: A University System of Georgia (USG) initiative to promote student success by providing affordable textbook alternatives and provide a one-stop service to help USG faculty and staff identify lower-cost, electronic, free, and open educational resources (OER).

OER Course Example: An Open-Access course created at Valdosta State University.

OER implemented at California State University.

OER as implemented by the University of Oklahoma.

OER at California State University - San Marcos.

OER at Emory University.

OER implemented at Northern Virginia Community College.

OER textbook initiative at Kansas State University.

An OER initiative at the American University.

OER as implemented by Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

OER initiative at Bristol Community College.

OER initiative at Fort Hays State University.

OER initiative at Lane Community College.

Open Oregon Educational Resources promotes textbook affordability for community college and university students, and facilitates widespread adoption of open, low-cost, high-quality materials.

OER textbook initiative at Oregon State.

The purpose of the Textbook Affordability Project (TAP) is to promote awareness of and access to textbook affordability issues and provide solutions to make course materials available that are up-to-date, satisfy academic needs, and are affordable to students.