Open Educational Resources

The Ithaca College Library participates in the Digital Commons Network, which brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by academic librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.

To locate OER materials to use for instruction, here is a suggested search strategy:

1. Search the Ebook Central database - the library subscribes to this database, which includes full-text titles with multiple user access.
2. Then search Merlot.org – “curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators”
3. Next search the OER Commons – a digital public library that offers tools for collaboration, sharing and remixing openly licensed course materials. It features tools for evaluation, quality review and improvement of high-quality resources.
4. Check OpenStax  Your search results will be sorted by relevance, so the first 5 sources are the most useful. Note that the filter by date applies to the entire collection, not the individual search.
5. Check the Open Textbook Library  "These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization."
6. For the Humanities, LIbriVox includes recordings of literary classics, autobiographies, plays, and poetry

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