Free!
There are lots of free resources on the Internet, but some are free in a different way — free for you to use, change, keep, and redistribute.
David Wiley’s 5 Rs of Reuse
‘The oft quoted phrase is ‘freedom as in speech, not as in beer’, but this confusion between these two types of ‘free’ is one that arises repeatedly with regards to open education’ (Weller, 2014, pp. 37-38).
- See also: My essay, What it means to be open”.
This table is a work-in-progress. It lists places you can find open educational resources (OER) — that is, resources you can use, change, keep, and redistribute. In some cases, they are individual learning objects like videos or pictures, while in other cases they are objects grouped together into full courses. This isn’t meant to be a full listing, but just a sampling to reflect the range of available material.
You can use the search feature to find items of specific interest in the table.
| Institution | Bragging rights | Resource types | Topics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Music Archive (FMA) | Launched in 2009, this is a curated music archive, which means the quality is pretty high. | music | music |
| Johns Hopkins School of Public Health Open CourseWare (OCW) | This initiative provides an astonishing range of public health courses. Johns Hopkins is ranked first in public health schools in the US, so the quality is very high. | courses; case studies; videos; images | science |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare | This project's goal is to provide for free all the information university professors need to teach the courses offered at MIT. As such, it provides course structure, sequence of topics, lists of textbooks, and other materials needed by teachers (not primarily students). There are more than 2300 courses available online, and over 80 of them include video lectures. OCW Scholar courses are designed for independent study (that is, the focus is on providing information for students, not teachers). | syllabuses; videos; courses | math; science; business; engineering; music; literature; and more |
| Tufts University OpenCourseWare (OCW) | This project has a focus on providing courses on the health sciences. They have also developed the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK), the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE), and a dozen other open educational resource projects for sharing books, data, and more. | courses; books; videos; photos; datasets; journals; | science; engineering; GIS |
| Utah State University OpenCourseWare (OCW) | This project provides many of the courses offered at Utah State. They are also developing an open content management system for open courseware, called eduCommons. | courses; images; quizzes; video lectures; teacher guides | anthropology; science; engineering; economics; education; English; history; instructional technology and learning sciences; philosophy; speech communication; Chinese; math; psychology; theater; and more |
| Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative (OLI) | Carnegie Mellon is trying something a bit different -- they provide open courses, but with a focus on providing a lot of interactivity to mimic the effects of a classroom experience. | courses | English; Arabic; science; French; engineering; Spanish; Chinese; management; psychology; visual design; math; and more |
| Washington state's Open Course Library (OCL) | This project has lowered higher education costs in Washington state by providing curriculum support for the 81 most-popular courses given at their community and technical colleges. It also ha an additional project called Air Washington that focuses on the aerospace industry. Note that most of the resources are open, but a few are not. | courses | accounting; anthropology; art; American Sign Language (ASL); science; business; communication; drama; economics; English; French; history; humanities; math; music; philosophy; engineering; political science; psychology; sociology; Spanish |
| Rice University's OpenStax initiative | Launched in 1999, this initiative began as Connexions. There are now three projects: OpenStax CNX for open resources, OpenStax College for publishing textbooks, and OpenStax Tutor for research. They are providing college textbooks, libraries of educational materials, and personalized learning experiences from tutors. | books; courses | math; science; economics and business; history; music; engineering |
| Europeana | Portal to over 52 million resources in Europe, including items from over 2000 libraries, museums, and other institutions. | images; photos; music; books; videos; sounds | art; music; history |
| Open University's OpenLearn | This project started in 2006 as an experiment by OU to find out how they could embrace this level of openness. They have released extracts from over 800 of their courses, for informal learning (and you can earn badges for most of them). | courses; activities; sound; videos | science; education; history; art; finance; math; politics; engineering; environment; Chinese; English; French; Gaelic; German; Italian; Spanish; Welsh; sociology; psychology; and much more |
| Saylor Academy | The Saylor Foundation began in 1999. Its focus is to provide open courses, and it now holds more than 300 of them. Twenty-two of the courses can be taken for college credit. | courses | art; science; business and economics; communication; history; English; math; philosophy; political science; psychology; sociology; and more |
| Siyavula | This group makes free math and science textbooks, currently used in 4th - 12th grades in South Africa. | books | science; math; technology |
| Wikimedia Commons | Part of the Wikimedia family, the Commons holds more than 31 million media files. | photos; videos; sounds; animations; images | art; history; nature; culture; science; engineering |
| Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) | This website lists open access journals. It's database currently holds records for more than 10,000 journals, with an average of 4 journals added each day. | journals | agriculture; library science; education; art; geography; anthropology; history; languages; law; medicine; music; philosophy; psychology; religion; political science; science; and more |
| Flickr's The Commons | Started in 2008 with a partnership with The Library of Congress, and now holds the archives of over 100 institutions. | photos | art; history; nature; culture |
| Khan Academy | Started in 2006, this site focuses on short instructional videos, practice exercises, and tools for educators, with millions of students attending the lectures and 36 languages represented in the resources. | videos; interactive exercises | math; science; art; history; music; technology; economics and finance; test preparation (SATs and college admissions) |
| Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) | This is a curated repository of teaching and learning material. It began in 1997 as an initiative from California State University. They also have thriving communities centered around academic discipline, academic support, and partnerships. | books; animations; assessment tools; case studies; portfolios; learning objects; courses; presentations; reference material; simulations; social networking tools; tutorials; workshop materials | academia; education; art; business; humanities; math; science; technology; social sciences; workforce development |
| Public Library of Science (PLOS) | Founded in 2001, this site publishes peer-reviewed scientific research. More than 100,000 authors, including 59 Nobel Laureates, have published with PLOS. | journal articles | science |
| Skills Commons | This site focuses on career training. It was launched by a partnership between the US Department of Labor, California State University, and the MERLOT program, and now over 700 institutions contribute resources to it. | learning exercises; case studies; assignments; courses; animations; books; quizzes and tests; simulations; reference materials; syllabuses; tutorials; and more | science; technology; engineering; manufacturing; trade; business and finance; public administration; and more |
| TED | TED started in the 1990s, and videos of TED conference talks have been offered since 2006 under Creative Commons license. There are more than 2400 TED talks available. | videos | art; science; technology; history; culture; nature; engineering; literature; music; religion; and quite a bit more |
References
Weller, M. (2014) The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory, London, ubiquity press. DOI: 10.5334/bam. Also available at http://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/books/detail/11/battle-for-open/ (Accessed 22 April 2016).