Note to Faculty
For more information and to view the courses currently being offered fully with Open Education Resources, please see the Registrar's website at http://www.registrar.txstate.edu/resources/oer
Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible online teaching and learning materials. They can be videos, textbooks, quizzes, learning modules and more. Using OER in your classroom will improve student engagement and success, provide immediate, equitable access to resources, save money for your students, and provide you a venue to use flexible, high-quality learning materials in your individualized curriculum. This guide collects the best-of-the-best OER and organizes them by college and department. Take a look and see what is available in your discipline.
- Open Textbook is a term used to indicate a Textbook that is fully OER.
- Public Resources are materials that are free, but licenses still protect the content in some way.
- Library Resources do not cost your students any money, and should also be considered as a means to lower the total cost of learning for your students.
- Affordable Learning Materials: course materials that cost students $50or less, in total.
Tips for finding and using OER and other affordable content:
- There are lots of OER materials out there. It takes time and persistence to find the ones that best fit your students' academic and research needs.
- Instead of focusing on the textbook that you want to replace, focus on what you want your students to know or do.
- Use the resources in this guide to find OER relevant to your discipline and courses. These links are great starting points but if you are not finding the OER that work for you, contact your librarian for personalized help.
- If you find an article in a library database that you want to use in a course, Library staff can help you with copyright considerations and provide access to the resource through reserves, embed in an online course, or on a website.
- Talk with your librarian with any questions you have about finding and using OER.
Links to more detailed information about OER and copyright:
Find eBooks owned by the Library
Open Journals
- International Journal of Advanced Robotic SystemsCovering all aspects of and within robotics, provides readers with in-depth source of scientifically valid and peer-reviewed references. Presents topic-related articles to cover a wide array of research areas within robotics.
Open Textbooks
- Open Textbook Library - Computer and Information SystemsCurated by a consortium led by UMN, all textbooks in this library are complete and openly licensed.
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)Academic, peer reviewed texts published Open Access.
- InTech -InTech is the publisher of one of the largest multidisciplinary open access collection of books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Public Resources
- Khan Academy - Computer ScienceKhan Academy has courses on Algorithms, Cryptography, Information Theory, and the Internet. You can grab embed code for specific videos to relate to content in your class or refer students to Khan Academy.
- NanoHubNCN seeks to: 1) engage an ever-growing and more diverse cyber-community that shares novel, high-quality research and educational resources to spark new modes of discovery, innovation, learning, and engagement, 2) accelerate the transformation of nanoscience to nanotechnology through a tight linkage of simulation to experiment, 3) develop open-source software, and 4) inspire and educate the next workforce generation.
Library Resources - Databases
- ACM Digital Library This link opens in a new windowJournal articles, conference proceedings, and ebooks from the ACM and affiliated organizations. 1954-present.
- Applied Science & Technology Source This link opens in a new window
Contains the complete content of Industrial Arts Index (1913-1957) and Applied Science & Technology Index (1958-1983), plus select full text articles from 1965 to present.
- CiteSeer - Scientific Literature Digital Library This link opens in a new windowSearch engine focused on surfacing and disseminating scientific literature primarily in computer and information science.
- IEEE Xplore This link opens in a new window
Current electrical engineering, electronics and computer science literature, featuring journals & conference proceedings from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Institution of Engineering & Technology (IET) from 1950 to present. Current, archived, and redlined IEEE standards from 1988 to present.
- O'Reilly This link opens in a new windowFull-text access to books from publishers such as O’Reilly Media, Addison-Wesley, Peachpit Press, Manning, John Wiley & Sons, Apress, Adobe Press, Talented Pixie and Splash Media.
- ScienceDirect This link opens in a new window
Scholarly journals and books in physical sciences & engineering, life sciences, health, medicine, social sciences, and humanities. Not all content is full-text.
- SPIE Digital Library This link opens in a new windowJournal articles, technical papers, and conference proceedings and ebooks in optical design and engineering, imaging and signal processing, remote sensing, semiconductor devices, and medical imaging. 1932 to present.
- SpringerLink This link opens in a new window
Access to Springer journals, ebooks, protocols, conference papers, and reference books. Multidisciplinary.
