Collaborate with the Learning Commons to find Open Educational Resources (OER) that best fit your criteria.
A Learning Commons professional can help:
John Fitzsimmons │ Learning Commons │ Librarian
Maggie Eirenschmalz │ Learning Commons │ LibrarianSarah Krutz │ Learning Commons │ Instructional Designer
The term “open content” describes any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms like “open source”) that is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:
Lumen OER course materials replace expensive textbooks and provide engaging, interactive content (text, video, simulations, practice questions, etc.). The materials are accessible and mobile-friendly, as well as low cost and highly effective. Visit the Lumen Course Catalog.
OpenStax College offers free textbooks which are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course.
These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost.
Each of the 100+ books are freely available for download, online reading, and sharing, under one of various open licenses. Be sure to check each book for specific terms.
Search through collections curated by digital librarians and easily create openly licensed educational resources. Combine text, images, sound, videos, or supplemental materials into resources you can share and remix with your colleagues and educators around the world.
The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts.
Browse or search the table located in OpenOregon to find out what Oregon Community College instructors are using to reduce textbook costs. If you see a name and email address, feel free to contact that person about their class.
FlatWorld textbooks come complete with a full range of instructor supplements, included homework system, and an easy-to-use customization platform, all at no extra cost. Check out this Psychology Textbook Example!
Project Gutenberg is an online library of free eBooks. Everything from Project Gutenberg is gratis, libre, and completely without cost to readers.
The textbooks on this site are all released under a free content license. No one can stop you from using these materials, modifying them or distributing them.
MyOpenMath is designed for mathematics, providing delivery of homework, quizzes, and tests with rich mathematical content.
The Merlot collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder web pages, together with associated comments, and bookmark collections, all intended to enhance the teaching experience of using a learning material.
Peer-reviewed journals covering agriculture, the sciences, business and more.
You may copy reasonable portions of the content for lesson plans, interactive whiteboards, reports, dissertations, presentations, school newspapers and for similar nonprofit educational purposes to the extent permitted by applicable law.
Search for quality open textbooks offered in a variety of digital formats; the first step in adopting open educational resources. Search by subject and download them to your computer.
Visit to browse open textbooks and learning materials.
Explore 904,857 items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections.
Search for OER content here!
Use Hypothesis to annotate online documents as a group and also to take notes. Learn more about how Hypothesis works.
Open Clip Art Library Public domain contemporary graphics contributed by users.
Open Icon Library Open collection of icons.
Wikimedia Commons - Crystal Clear Icons Icon collection in the Wikimedia Commons.
Wikimedia Commons - Tango Icons Icon collection in the Wikimedia Commons.
Search through collections curated by digital librarians and easily create openly licensed educational resources. Combine text, images, sound, videos, or supplemental materials into resources you can share and remix with your colleagues and educators around the world.
Also, be sure to peruse Creative Commons Licenses.
TMCC has partnered with Kanopy so there are no fees and no commercials included with the videos. Discover remarkable and enriching films on Kanopy!
Some of these sites are completely open access, while other sites offer only selected images for open access. Many also contain advertising and offer images for sale. Be sure to read each site's conditions for use; different images from the same site may have different use restrictions. Please contact your librarian if you have questions.
Open-Source Multimedia, Open-Source Sound, Open-Source Photos.
Some of these sites are completely open access, while other sites offer only selected images for open access. Many also contain advertising and offer images for sale. Be sure to read each site's conditions for use; different images from the same site may have different use restrictions. Please contact your librarian if you have questions.
A repository for free public domain images.
Some of these sites are completely open access, while other sites offer only selected images for open access. Many also contain advertising and offer images for sale. Be sure to read each site's conditions for use; different images from the same site may have different use restrictions. Please contact your librarian if you have questions.
Public domain images, royalty free stock photos, copyright friendly free images.
Some of these sites are completely open access, while other sites offer only selected images for open access. Many also contain advertising and offer images for sale. Be sure to read each site's conditions for use; different images from the same site may have different use restrictions. Please contact your librarian if you have questions.
One of the best sites to locate free stock photos!
Some of these sites are completely open access, while other sites offer only selected images for open access. Many also contain advertising and offer images for sale. Be sure to read each site's conditions for use; different images from the same site may have different use restrictions. Please contact your librarian if you have questions.
Fantastic media repository that is part of the Wikipedia umbrella project where users are free to use any of the photos, audio, videos, and other media freely.
Some of these sites are completely open access, while other sites offer only selected images for open access. Many also contain advertising and offer images for sale. Be sure to read each site's conditions for use; different images from the same site may have different use restrictions. Please contact your librarian if you have questions.
Institutes such as The Library Of Congress, Powerhouse Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, and various users can post and share images that have no known copyright restrictions.
Another fantastic location to locate high resolution digital stock photography.
A fantastic site linking to other U.S. government sites containing many free and public domain.
A good collection of original pictures from old books that are no longer copyrighted and considered public domain.
Hand curated images from the world’s most talented photographers.
Searches only Creative Commons content in Flickr. Additional tools for blogs and websites, including resizing tool, photo credit builder, and code generator.
Art and architecture images photographed by art historian and visual resources curator Allan Kohl.
Images from the Library of Congress, now in the public domain.
Images of these works are available free of charge for any use, commercial or non-commercial. Users do not need to contact the Gallery for authorization to use these images. They are available for download at the NGA Images website (images.nga.gov).
The Open-i project aims to provide next generation information retrieval services for biomedical articles from the full text collections such as PubMed Central.
A great place to find thousands of images that are in the public domain.
The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
YouTube & Copyright A case from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that inline linking does not directly infringe copyright because no copy is made on the site providing the link; the link is just HTML code pointing to the image or other material.
Tenor More than 300M people use Tenor every month to communicate with an animated GIF that expresses their exact thoughts or feelings.
GIPHY GIPHY is not just GIFs... we are Stickers, Arcade, Video, and much more. Every day, we are serving 10+ billion pieces of GIPHY content to a daily user reach of 700+ million people, helping them express themselves and make their everyday conversations more entertaining.
BURST Cinemagraphs & Moving Images Browse our stunning library of free cinemagraphs and moving pictures for entrepreneurs. These animated gifs feature trending products and are perfect for websites, ads, hero images & social media.
Moving Image Archive Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.
Videvo Browse 8,500+ motion graphics!
