Textbooks - OER - Open Educational Resources - Research Guides at Southwest Minnesota State University

Open Textbook Library - University of Minnesota
"Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. 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. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.
The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network."
BC Open Textbook Collection
From British Columbia. "In addition to reducing costs for students, the open textbook project facilitates an improved learning environment for instructors and students. By sharing, reusing, and remixing the available content, instructors can tailor-fit the material for their curriculum and follow Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles to improve accessibility for all students."
LibreTexts
"The libraries are part of a huge network that provides not just single textbooks, but an infinitely large library through which new texts can be developed & shared."
MIT Open Courseware: Online Textbooks
"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."
OpenStax
"OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University, and it’s our mission to improve student access to education. Our first openly licensed college textbook was published in 2012, and our library since scaled to more than 20 books for college and AP courses used by hundreds of thousands of students. Our adaptive learning technology, designed to improve learning outcomes through personalized educational paths, is being piloted in college courses across the country."
Open SUNY
"The mission of Open SUNY Textbooks is to provide an academic-friendly publishing model and infrastructure which supports faculty adoption, remixing, and creation of open educational resources (OER) and courses."

NEW! Faculty Select

Please contact Mara Wiggins or any of the librarians to get the link to use this resource. (Licensing restrictions prevent us from making it available here.)

Faculty can search across OER and purchasable eBooks all in one clean, powerful interface. Once they identify a title that is of interest, they can evaluate the book and decide if it is something they want to adopt. In the case of OER, they are provided a link to include in their course. In the case of a book not yet owned by the library, they submit a purchase request. That request is routed to a library contact who can review and complete the order and notify the faculty member when the book is ready to be included in their course.

Watch this brief introduction from Ebsco: Faculty Select

EBSCO Faculty Select is made up of two types of records:

Open Textbooks (OER), including:
- Open Textbook Network
- SUNY Open Textbooks
- Open BC Textbooks
- OAPEN Library
- BC Open Textbooks
- More are planned.
eBooks that are available for purchase.
- EBSCO Unlimited User frontlist eBooks (with DRM protections)
- Taylor and Francis DRM-free e-books
- Wiley DRM-free e-books
- Cambridge DRM-free e-books

Questions? Contact Mara Wiggins.

OER Commons

OER Commons
"OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources." Includes Open Author: "Open Author helps you build Open Educational Resources, lesson plans, and courses (on your own, or with others) — and then publish them, to the benefit of educators and learners everywhere. Select one of our authoring formats to get started:"
Minnesota OER Commons
Tools and resources for educators and subject matter experts in Minnesota to collaboratively evaluate, share, and develop Open Educational Resources for public education.

Books

Internet Archive: eBooks and Texts
Project Gutenberg
offers over 56,000 free eBooks: Choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, especially older works for which copyright has expired. We digitized and diligently proofread them with the help of thousands of volunteers.

Other Educational Resources

MERLOT II
""The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder webpages, together with associated comments, and bookmark collections, all intended to enhance the teaching experience of using a learning material. All of these items have been contributed by the MERLOT member community, who have either authored the materials themselves, or who have discovered the materials, found them useful, and wished to share their enthusiasm for the materials with others in the teaching and learning community. All the materials in MERLOT are reviewed for suitability for retention in the collection.""
eBooks Minnesota: Scholarly Resources

OER - Open Educational Resources: Textbooks

OER Commons

Books

Other Educational Resources