OER and Library Resources by College: Respiratory Care

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:

1. 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.
2. Instead of focusing on the textbook that you want to replace, focus on what you want your students to know or do.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Talk with your librarian with any questions you have about finding and using OER. 

Links to more detailed information about OER and copyright:

• Scholarly Communication and Open Access Publishing
• Open Access Movement
• Using Streaming Video in Teaching
• University Copyright Office

• SAGE Open Medical Case Reports 

  A peer reviewed, open access journal. It publishes short case reports providing key insights into real medical cases essential for physicians, and that ultimately help to improve patient outcomes.

• MedEdPORTAL: The Journal of Teaching and Learning Resources 

  A peer reviewed open-access journal of teaching and learning resources in the health professions published by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), in partnership with the American Dental Education Association.

• PLoS Journals 

  The Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization founded to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. PLOS publishes a suite of influential Open Access journals across all areas of science and medicine.

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• Europe PMC 

  The core mission of Europe PMC (http://europepmc.org) is to build open, full-text scientific literature resources and support innovation by engaging users, enabling contributors and integrating related research data.

• Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) Collection 

  A collection of over 22,000 freely available digital materials for health sciences education.

• Digital Commons Network - medicine & health sciences 

  Brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Includes peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.

• MedEdPORTAL 

  MedEdPORTAL Publications promotes educational scholarship and collaboration by facilitating the open exchange of peer-reviewed health education teaching and assessment resources.

• MERLOT Materials: Respiratory Care 

  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.

• OER Commons - Respiratory

OER Commons provides access to teaching and learning materials for free use and reuse without attribution.  

• OPENPediatrics 

  OPENPediatrics is an open access educational platform and online community of clinicians sharing best practices from all resource settings around the world through innovative collaboration and digital learning technologies.

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• College Open Textbooks - Medicine 

  A collection of peer-reviewed, open textbooks available online or for download.

• InTech - medicine 

  InTech is the publisher of one of the largest multidisciplinary open access collection of books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine.

• CDC Public Health Image Library 

  PHIL offers an organized, universal electronic gateway to CDC's pictures. We welcome public health professionals, the media, laboratory scientists, educators, students, and the worldwide public to use this material for reference, teaching, presentation, and public health messages.

• U. S. Census Bureau: Health 

  The Census Bureau provides accurate, detailed, and up-to-date statistics—covering people and business—relating to health in America.

• CDC Data & Statistics 

  Data and statistics provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It is a public domain Web site, which means you may link to CDC.gov at no cost and without specific permission.

• Data.gov 

  Explore datasets, tools, and applications related to health and health care. These resources come from across the Federal Government with the goal of improving the health and lives of all Americans.

• FastStats (CDC, NCHS) 

  An index for quick and easy access to selected statistics on a variety of health topics, the latest data in reports, databases, and other resources, and additional data and tools.

• Partners - Health Data Tools & Statistics 

  Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce is a collaboration of U.S. government agencies, public health organizations, and health sciences libraries which provides timely, convenient access to selected public health resources on the Internet.

• World Health Organization (WHO) - Global Health Observatory 

  The GHO data repository is WHO's gateway to health-related statistics for its 194 Member States. It provides access to over 1000 indicators on priority health topics.