LibGuides: OER and Library Resources by College: Journalism & Mass Communication

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 Textbooks

OpenStax
Tens of thousands of learning objects, called pages, that are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device, anywhere, anytime.
OER Commons - communication studies
A digital content hub offering a suite of quality OER supports.
Google Books
Search full-text of books. In advanced search, select "full view only" and "books."
Open Textbook Library - public speaking
The textbook provides a comprehensive discussion of topics related to public speaking, including focused chapters on commonly assigned informative, persuasive, and entertaining speeches.
OAPEN
OAPEN builds a quality controlled collection of Open Access books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences, and develops services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance and digital preservation.
Pressbooks
Browse our directory of over 5,000 books. Use Pressbooks Create to clone content from the directory and adapt it for your course.

Directories of OER Materials - All Disciplines

Bloomsbury Open Access Book Collection
MERLOT
The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
OAPEN
This non-profit Netherlands-based organization works with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books, and provide services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance and digital preservation.
OASIS
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 98 different sources and contains 368,234 records.
OER Commons
Developed by ISKME, OER Commons is a multi-disciplinary repository and community for creators, users, and re-users of multi-media OER Content and curriculum.
Open Stax
Created by Rice University, Open Stax is a peer-reviewed directory of unique OER content. Reuse and remix as you like, or assign an Open Stax textbook for your class. Open Stax books are also available printed, and can be purchased through the bookstore usually for about $15 (the cost of printing).
Open Textbook Library
A consortium led by University of Minnesota has curated a collection of hundreds of textbooks across the disciplines. Faculty who have used the textbooks leave reviews on their quality and content.

Public Resources

These places gather together content (books, videos, etc.) that are free with some copyright protection.

Book Boon
Bookboon.com is a Danish publisher of original books and textbooks, all available free online. They are committed to providing free learning resources in education and for business.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy's mission is to privde a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. They offer embed codes for their videos, or you can set up a classroom through Google to track students progress on the site.
Wolfram Alpha Demonstrations
Wolfram Alpha offers demonstration videos of concents in every discipline, though their strength is in STEM fields.
WorldBank's Open Knowledge Repository:
The World Bank is the largest single source of development knowledge. The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.