Skip to Main Content

ZTC/OER Basics: How to Find OER

A basic guide to help fellow librarians, students, faculty and staff diving into the world of Zero Cost Textbook Courses (ZTC) and Open Education Resources (OER)

How to find OER

The Hunt for OER

Many want all OER to be in a centralized location like a google search engine so you can find everything you need quickly and easily. Unfortunately this is not the case. There are various sites with OER. Some are big repositories and hold everything from textbooks to quizzes, others are focused around 1 thing, such as textbooks or exercises. For instance OER commons is a site with lots of resources while Open Textbook Library is focused only on OER textbooks. Sometimes materials will be uploaded to one site and not the other. That is why it is always good to ask a librarian for help or check out this or other academic library libguides. Some other colleges and universities have created subject specific guides which can be a great starting point if you don't know where to look. 

General Resources

Textbook Specific

Subject Based Libguides

If you are feeling overwhelmed that is ok. Sometimes it is easiest to look at subject based OER libguides. Here we have compiled some of the best ones that exist right now. They break down OER by subject and then different categories within that subject such as textbook, databases, courses, videos and more.