Open Educational Resources (OER)

There are many ways to find OER. Sites that host the OER are generally called repositories. Many will have some sort of review or acceptance process to determine what gets included. There are also specialized search engines that look through multiple OER repositories. 

This page covers a list of repositories and search engines that can be used to find OER for a wide variety of disciplines, and it aims to cover primarily the most popular tools. For more comprehensive lists of OER repositories and search engines, use these sources:

• Open and Affordable Course Materials | Eastern Tennessee State University
• OER at Valencia College
• Find OER by Discipline | Virginia Tech

Tennessee Open Education, the statewide project to improve access to OER and other low-cost educational materials across Tennessee, provides the Tennessee Open Education Hub in OER Commons. In the Hub you can find, share, and adapt OER resources from colleagues statewide.

Within the Hub, different campuses and systems have their own groups, including one for the University of Memphis. By joining the UofM group, you will be able to save, share, and adapt OER with your colleagues across campus.

The OER Commons Help Center provides an overview of how to use OER Commons. 

• Canvas Commons is a repository of educational materials available through Canvas.
  • Any type of material that you can create in Canvas, from documents and pages to quizzes and assignments and even whole modules and courses, can be shared to the Commons and imported into your own course to use.
  • Some of these materials are true OER, allowing you to edit and adapt them to your own needs, but everything in the Commons can at least be used as is in your course. 
• Instructors adding material to the Commons can share their materials under full copyright or numerous Creative Commons licenses, allowing you to determine what 5R uses the license allows.
  • This also gives you the ability to control uses of your material if you share to the Commons.
  • You also can choose to share your materials only with internal UofM audiences. 

Canvas Commons Help Guides

Commons Overview from Instructure Canvas Community on Vimeo. View the video script.

• How do I use Commons? 
• How do I import and view a Commons resource in Canvas? 
• How do I view updates to resources I previously imported from Commons? 
• What information do I need to share a resource to Commons? 
• Complete list of Commons help guides