Open Educational Resources and E-Textbooks

A large number of open educational resource textbooks have been made available.  Many are peer-reviewed!  In addition, many OER sites provide related, non-textbook, course content that is also open and available for anyone to use (and remake, if they would like). All of this content is available freely on the open web for faculty and students.

Here's a list of sites that include freely available OER textbooks and other course/teaching materials (in no particular order).  Some are discipline-specific, and some contain multidisciplinary resources.

• Open Textbook Library  

• Open Stax  

• OER Commons  

• BC Open Textbooks Collection  

• Open SUNY Textbooks  

• MERLOT  

• The Teaching Commons  

• Luminos  

• Lumen Learning  

• eLangdell Bookstore  

• Purdue University Press Ebooks  

• UC Press Ebooks Collection  

• University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions  

• OASIS  

• Project Gutenberg  

• College Open Textbooks  

• Open Textbook Store  

• Open Learning Initiative (OLI)  

• Teach Astronomy  

• LibreTexts

Needs some ideas for implementing electronic textbooks in your courses?  These organizations have useful research and best practices to check out.

• E-textbooks - EDUCAUSE 

• IU E-Texts 

• The Open Syllabus Project—The authors set out to scrape college Web sites and have put together the metadata for over 1 million syllabuses. The project identifies all of the materials assigned to undergraduates and ranks them by frequency.