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Open Educational Resources

Find OER

An important first step in adopting OER is finding content that matches your teaching and learning goals. The open education community is working to assign meaningful metadata to OER content that makes them findable in search engines, repositories, and referatories.

Watch How Can I Find OER?  [Link opens in a new tab]

Types of OER Search Tools

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Open Referatories:

Referatories are websites that curate collections of OER. These will link you out to downloadable content and files.

Open Repositories:

Open repositories provide free hosting for OER content, and typically offer services that make it easy to find and curate OER on their platform.  

Search Engines:

Search tools that examine OER machine readable metadata to return results, for example Creative Commons Search or Google Advanced Search Usage Rights limiters.

 

 

 

Adapted from UH OER Training, Knowing where to find OER, by William Meinke licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Get Started

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When searching for OER, consider what you are looking for before you begin. Are you interested in texts, digital lectures, test banks? Use these terms and search features to filter your results. We recommend keeping a list of potential OER you find. The next step will be Evaluating OER.

 

Not finding exactly what you need? Remember that most OER can be revised and remixed to match your particular needs. While locating and remixing will take time and intellectual energy, those efforts can enormously benefit your students and the learning experiences. Explore tips and resources for Adapting OER.

CU Boulder Open Educator Reviews

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Explore some reviews authored by your fellow CU educators that have been published with the Open Textbook Network.