Open Access guide: Open Textbooks & OERs

This guide will help USask researchers and students understand what open access (OA) is and how to make their own works OA.

Open Education @ USask

Liaison librarians have subject expertise and can help instructors find open textbooks or other open educational resources (OERs) appropriate for their classes. They can also suggest library resources so that students do not need to pay for course materials. Find the liaison for your discipline at the link below.

Heather Ross, at the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning, can assist you in adopting and/or adapting an open textbook for your USask course. There is also funding to support this adaptation or creation of OERs.

Find out more:

Find, Adopt, & Adapt an Open Textbook

Logo for Saskatchewan Open Education Resources

SaskOER
Access free textbooks, manuals, videos/audio and other academic resources from Saskatchewan post-secondary institutions.

Other options:

BC Campus
In October 2012, the BC Ministry of Advanced Education announced its support for the creation of open textbooks for the 40 highest enrolled first and second year subject areas in the province’s public post-secondary system.
OpenStax
Site for free online textbooks (and low-cost print versions) for common introductory university-level courses. The books are developed and peer-reviewed by educators and are also customizable to the course needs. OpenStax is a non-profit organization initiated by Rice University and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others.
Open Textbook Library
This is an aggregator of high-quality open access textbooks run by the University of Minnesota.
Wikibooks
This is a collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit.

Other Free Online Education Resources

Merlot
Merlot is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.

Khan Academy
The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. All of the site's resources are available to anyone.

Some Definitions

Open Education is a collection of practices and principles that encourage collaboration among educators to create educational resources that can be freely shared and distributed for learning and further collaboration.

Open Educational Resources (OERs), are educational materials which are licensed in ways that provide permissions for individuals and institutions to reuse, adapt and modify the materials for their own use (source).

Open CourseWare (OCW) is a free and open digital publication of high-quality college and university level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content. Open CourseWare is free and openly licensed, accessible to anyone, anytime via the internet.

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at large-scale online participation.

OER Foundation

OER Foundation
The Open Education Resource (OER) Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organisation that provides leadership, international networking and support for educators and educational institutions to achieve their objectives through Open Education.