All rights reserved repositories
The following is a list of repositories that reserve copyright. Levels of access vary, with some repositories requiring registration, while others do not. Though it might be argued that these repositories are not OER, they have been included because of their pedagogical value.
Contents
General Repositories
Athabasca University (AU) is Canada's leading distance-education and online university; Canada's Open University. AU currently serves about 32,000 students per year, following a period of rapid growth which has seen student numbers double over a six-year period. Some 260,000 students have registered in AU's individualized courses and programs since the University was created by the Government of Alberta in 1970. License: All rights reserved. http://www.athabascau.ca/
DAREnet was launched in January 2004 to demonstrate the network of the local collections of digital documentation held by all Dutch universities and several related institutions. DAREnet harvests all “full content” digital material from the local repositories, presents it in a consistent form and makes it searchable. Materials include teaching and learning resources, and academic research output, in both English and Dutch. 100,000 resources. All rights reserved. http://www.darenet.nl/en/page/language.view/search.page
Database of web-based resources useful for teaching and learning from several Australian repositories. It is organized around Australian school and high school curriculum, its tools are free to Australian educators, it is funded by the bodies responsible for education provision in Australia and run by a non-profit company. Anyone may access the EdNA website and use the resources, information and communication areas for education and training purposes. All rights reserved. http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/search/
A US consortium effort to provide educators and learners with quick and easy access to thousands of educational resources, including activities, lesson plans, online projects and assessment items suitable for use in the classroom, found on the websites of some 600 consortium members, including US government agencies, educational institutions, non-profit and commercial organizations. Over 40,000 records. All rights reserved. http://www.thegateway.org/
As the name implies, Google Video is hosted by Google and includes results from YouTube as well. Recommendations made based on past searches through Google's search engine. Videos are free to play, but are not available for download. All rights reserved. http://video.google.com/
Collection of K-12 resources from other educational repositories, organized by subject. Requires Flash plug-in (free to download). All rights reserved. http://www.hippocampus.org/
An initiative by the University of Wisconsin to identify, evaluate, catalog, and align to the Wisconsin education standards resources that are already on the Internet, such as lesson plans and reference materials. These resources are then made available from the ide@s search engine. Pre-kindergarten to higher education and adult education. Additionally, there are more than 100 video documents under Videoide@s which provides access to Wisconsin Public Television and Wisconsin Educational Communications Board programs as streaming video. All rights reserved. http://ideas.wisconsin.edu/
Funded by JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee), JORUM is a collaborative venture in UK Higher and Further Education to collect and share learning and teaching materials, allowing their reuse and repurposing, and standing as a national statement of the importance of creating interoperable, sustainable materials. Users can access the learning and teaching materials (which cover a range of subject areas) to enhance their students learning experience. Materials range from single assets (documents, images, diagrams) to more comprehensive learning objects (interactive units and content packages). Jorum accepts learning and teaching resources across all subject areas for both Higher and Further education in the UK. However the amount of content in each subject area is dependent on the community and individual users. More than 2,000 resources. JORUM deposit license. Note: On 21 Apr. 2008 JORUM announced it would move to a Creative Commons licensing framework. http://www.jorum.ac.uk/
The Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) is an electronic warehouse of ideas, examples, and resources (represented as "packages") that support student learning at the Maricopa Community Colleges. The packages might include a particular lesson, technique, method, activity, assignment that you either developed or applied in teaching. The "packing slip" might contain a description of the strategy with perhaps some outcomes described. Additional materials might be a Word/PDF document version of a handout, an image of engaged students, or a link to a web site created that describes the activity. At the time of this writing there are 1,472 packages. All rights reserved. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/search.php
A growing library of high-quality online courses for students and faculty in higher education, high school and Advanced Placement. Courses in the NROC library are contributed by developers from leading online-learning programs across the US. All courses are assessed to ensure they meet high standards of scholarship, instructional value and presentational impact. NROC works with developers and contributes resources to improve course quality and to provide ongoing maintenance. Courses are designed to cover the breadth and depth of topics based on generally accepted US curricula and can also be customized within a course management system. NROC partners with academic institutions, publishers, teaching organizations, US state and federal agencies, international distributors and others to create a global distribution network to provide courses to students, teachers and the general public at little or no cost. It is supported by a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation All rights reserved. http://www.montereyinstitute.org/
Working in partnership with subject experts and commercial developers, BECTA's (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) NLN Materials Team has commissioned and managed the development of Further Education e-learning materials for use in Virtual Learning Environments. The materials span the UK post-16 Education curriculum and are designed to be fitted easily into existing teaching. Around 400 learning objects. All rights reserved. http://www.nln.ac.uk/Materials/default.asp
The UK's free national gateway to Internet resources for the teaching, learning and research community. The RDN is a collaboration of over seventy educational and research organizations, including the Natural History Museum and the British Library, and builds upon the foundations of the subject gateway activity carried out under the JISC's (Joint Information Systems Committee). The service links to resources through a series of subject-based information gateways. Although primarily aimed at users in UK higher and further education, the network is freely available to all. Access to over 100,000 resources. In contrast to search engines, the RDN gathers resources which are carefully selected by subject specialists in our partner institutions. You can search and browse through the resources, and be confident that your results will connect you to Web sites relevant to learning, teaching and research in your subject area. All rights reserved. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/
Similar to YouTube, but meant specifically for educational use. TeacherTube asks its community to monitor the website for objectionable content, while YouTube does occasionally host content that may not be suitable. However, YouTube does reach a larger audience. Users can upload videos for free, but there is no method to download them. All rights reserved. http://www.teachertube.com/index.php
The Wisconsin Online Resource Center is a digital library of Web-based learning resources it has been developed primarily by faculty from the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) and produced by multimedia technicians who create the learning objects for the online environment. It is a searchable repository in wide range of subjects, all implemented in Flash(most browsers have the free Flash plug-in). You have to register to use the site, but this is free, and you can easily link to objects within the site, which is useful when developing your own online course. At present, 348 WTCS faculty members have authored around 2000 learning objects. All rights reserved. http://www.wisc-online.com/
WikiTeach is a website in which users can submit links to lesson plans. Topics range numbers to writing. 179 lesson plans. All rights reserved (with CC-BY-SA) allowances. http://www.wikiteach.org/
World Lecture Hall is a project of the Center for Instructional Technologies at the University of Texas at Austin. This project publishes links to pages created by faculty worldwide who are using the Web to deliver course materials in any language. Some courses can be accessed full text. Materials include syllabi, course notes, assignments, and audio and video streaming. WLH contains links to course materials for university-level courses. All rights reserved. http://web.austin.utexas.edu/wlh/
YouTube has a vast selection of videos (none longer than about fifteen minutes) that can viewed for free. While most people consider free access alone not enough to make it an open educational resources, YouTube offers access to a wealth of quality educational videos. Finally, there are limitations on how they can be included in commercial endeavors, and there is some legal uncertainty what that means for commercial education providers. All rights reserved. http://www.youtube.com
On the other hand, The Internet Archive has a video section that contains only copyleft licensed works at http://www.archive.org/details/movies
A list of other (mostly video) resources can be found here: http://soundblog.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D380EA83E108537F!2532.entry
We the Teachers is a repository specifically designed for K12 educators. It has lesson plans, PowerPoint presentations, games, tests and quizzes. Over 1,000 learning objects. All rights reserved. http://www.wetheteachers.com/index.php
Science Repositories
arXiv(pronounced as the word "archive"), set up by Cornell University, is an e-print archive specializing in Physics, Mathematics, Nonlinear Sciences, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology. It contains more than 380,000 documents, mainly as Postscript and PDF files. It is mainly designed for graduate education. No license agreement is published, so full copyright protection has to be assumed, but at least it is free to read. http://arxiv.org/
A collaboration between Hofstra University, the College of New Jersey, Pennsylvania State University, Villanova University and Virginia Tech, as part of the US National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library Project, to create a portal for computing education. CITIDEL is a digital library of educational resources for the computing field, harvested from ten different source collections. It contains to a wide variety of resources, addressed to a diversity of educational levels. 488,256 resources. All rights reserved. http://www.citidel.org/
A repository of peer-reviewed teaching resources for college and graduate level computer science education. The CSTC is designed to facilitate access to quality teaching materials developed worldwide. It is endorsed by the US Association of Computing Machinery and funded by the US National Science Foundation. Metadata for materials are created by users. CSTC is one of the source collections for CITIDEL. It contains all types of archives, but has not been updated since 2003. Over 10,000 resources. All rights reserved. http://csta.villanova.edu/CITIDEL/community-list
Funded by the US National Science Foundation, DLESE provides learners and educators at all levels with access to materials to support Earth system science education. The collection includes lesson plans, maps, images, data sets, assessment activities, curricula and online courses. The site also provides support services to help users effectively create, use and share OER, as well as communication networks to facilitate interactions and collaborations across the field of earth science. Over 25,000 learning objects. All rights reserved. http://www.dlese.org/
ESCOT is a testbed for the integration of innovative technology in middle school (K-12) mathematics. The project investigates replicable practices that produce predictably high quality digital learning resources. It contains graphs, tables and simulations, as well as tools for manipulating geometry and algebra, which can be integrated in math education software. All rights reserved. http://www.escot.org/
A project of Brown University's Computer Graphics Research Group to create a set of exemplary Web-based learning objects (Java applets) that teach concepts in introductory computer graphics at the college and graduate level. Users can download complete Java applets, or build their own from the components collection. The project also publishes the results of its research into creating useful learning objects, and is working toward the creation of a complete Design Strategy Handbook. 71 java applets for science and mathematics. http://www.cs.brown.edu/exploratories/home.html
The collection of Earth Sciences Sector geoscience databases that is managed and accessed by a series of Information Services (GDRIS). This site allows for you to discover, view and download, free of charge, thousands of maps since the mid-1800's, hundreds of digital maps from the Geological Survey of Canada, data related to fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) in Canada, 400 geochemical surveys, etc. All rights reserved. http://gdr.nrcan.gc.ca/index_e.php
Part of the US National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library Project, iLumina is a digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching materials for chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics and computer science. Resources range from small learning objects, such as individual images and video clips, to entire courses and several virtual collections. Both technical and education-specific metadata about each resource is available. Users may contribute their own resources. iLumina was developed by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Collegis, Inc., Virginia Tech, Georgia State University, Grand Valley State University and the College of New Jersey. Over 1,500 resources. All rights reserved. http://www.ilumina-dlib.org/
A free online service providing access to the very best Web resources for education and research, evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists. It covers the physical sciences, engineering, computing, geography, mathematics and environmental science. 33,094 resources. License varies. http://www.intute.ac.uk/sciences/
The Math Forum is a the leading online resource for improving math learning, teaching, and communication since 1992, created by teachers, mathematicians, researchers, students, and parents. It offers a wealth of problems and puzzles, online mentoring, research, team problem solving, collaborations and professional development. All rights reserved. http://mathforum.org/
Created by Wolfram Research. Contains web based (HTML) resources about algebra, applied mathematics, calculus and analysis, discrete mathematics, geometry, history, number theory, probability, statistics and topology, among others. No educational range is given, but subjects start mainly at the high school level and reach graduate level. The HTML headers of each page contain Dublin Core and Mathematics Subject Classification metadata (which is useful for other repositories). All rights reserved. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/
One interesting kind of resource is the classroom, which provides a set of pop-up "capsule summaries" for more than 300 mathematical terms.
Launched in September 2006, NPTEL is a joint venture of seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, funded by the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development. The main objective of the programme is to enhance the quality of engineering education in India by developing curriculum-based video and web courses at all levels of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching - learning materials, digitally taped classroom lectures, supplementary materials and links to research materials. Message boards are also available for each course. 118 courses in 6 areas of engineering, copyrighted. Note: Free registration required for some courses. All rights reserved. http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/home.php
A digital library of learning resources for engineering education. NEEDS provides web-based access to a database of learning resources where learners and instructors can search for, locate, download and comment on resources to aid their learning or teaching process. It is possible to search for resources suitable for mobile devices (so-called "Learning Everywhere" resources). NEEDS also supports a multi-tier review system for resources, from an industry-sponsored national award competition, to user-based reviews of individual learning resources. Materials are mainly at the undergraduate level. 1,220 resources. All rights reserved.
Note: Users will be charged a fee to access some content. http://www.needs.org/needs/
Created by the US National Science Foundation to provide organized access to high quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. NSDL provides an organized point of access to content that is aggregated from a variety of other digital libraries, NSF-funded projects, and NSDL-reviewed web sites. It also provides access to services and tools that enhance the use of this content in a variety of contexts. NSDL is designed primarily for school-level educators, but anyone can access and search the library at no cost. Access to most of the resources is free; however, some content providers require a nominal fee or subscription to retrieve their specific resources. 554 collections of resources. Various. All rights reserved. http://nsdl.org/
Note: Users will be charged a fee to access some content.
OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. The goal is to create a collection of previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources. 9,771,738 records from 701 institutions. All rights reserved. http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/
The SMETE (Science, Match, Engineering and Technology Educational) Digital Library is a dynamic online library and portal of services by the SMETE Open Federation for teachers and students, specializing in science, mathematics, engineering and technology education, addressing all levels of education. Partially supported by the National Science Foundation, National STEM Education Digital Library program. 15,885 resources for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. 20,000 resources total. All rights reserved. http://www.smete.org/smete/
A project of the US National Science Foundation and California State University to create interactive, online simulations for the life science laboratory or for earth science field studies. The activities are designed to enhance an existing curriculum and include online assessments. They can be used by school and college level students. The Virtual Courseware Project has 18 labs and simulations for the life and earth sciences, Copyright Virtual Courseware Project, All rights reserved. http://www.sciencecourseware.org/
Social Science
LoLa is the home to a Information Literacy Learning Object collection of the Wesleyan University (Connecticut). It is also an common pool of learning objects that staff of this university are developing. LoLa allows staff to discover materials developed by other faculty, and provide opportunities for collaboration within the academic disciplines on the Wesleyan campuses. LOLA is also the home to a collection of Information Literacy Learning Objects that being developed as part of a collaborative Information Literacy Project between Wesleyan, Trinity, and Connecticut College. At the moment the exchange is in beta version. Around 40 objects. All rights reserved. http://www.lolaexchange.org/
Humanities
The British Library in association with JISC gives access to 12,000 selected recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments. Anyone can search or browse the information on this site. Note: For copyright reasons, only people in licensed UK higher and further education institutions, or in designated reading rooms can play the recordings. Downloading is only available for licensed institutions. All rights reserved. http://sounds.bl.uk/
The Digital Scriptorium is an image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts, intended to unite scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research. It contains 15,000 images and 3,510 manuscripts and documents. All rights reserved to The Regents of the University of California. http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/Scriptorium/
An index of educational podcasts, ordered by educational level and/or language. http://www.podcastingnews.com/forum/link_6.htm
Repository with some java applets that are applicable to graphic design. See Science Repository section for complete listing. All rights reserved. http://www.cs.brown.edu/exploratories/home.html
A free online service providing access to the very best Web resources for education and research, evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists in the Arts and Humanities fields. Over 18,000 Web resources. http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/
The Education Podcast Network is an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century. Over 1,000 podcasts. http://epnweb.org/
Series of lessons covering periods in U.S. History such as the build-up to the Civil War and African American history.
Free Textbooks
U.S. Air Force publisher. PDF download. Exact number of titles unknown, but likely several dozen. http://www.maxwell.af.mil/au/aul/aupress/
Illustrated children's stories from authors such as Aesop, Hans Christian Anderson and Beatrix Potter. Over 50 books. http://www.simtalk.com/bibli/catalogue1024.htm
Public domain texts from popular authors (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, etc.). Includes study guides for some texts. Around 2,000 texts. http://www.bibliomania.com/
Selections of fiction and non-fiction books. Over 70 books. http://www.bartleby.com/
Children's literature books between 1894-1904. Over 30 books. http://diglib.lib.fsu.edu/ebind/docs/
Collection of open access books across a variety of subjects in the humanities. Not all of the books listed at eScholarship are open access, only 773 of 2,000. Regardless of access, all rights are reserved. http://www.escholarship.org/editions/
List of free textbooks. The Global Text Project has also proposed several business textbooks. 21 textbooks listed. All rights reserved. http://www.globaltext.org/About.html
Open access books on topics ranging from gender to politics. Exact number of books is unknown, but is likely over 1,000. http://www.gutenberg-e.org/
Open access children books, sorted by target age, length and other criteria. Some books are available in multiple languages. Requires free Java download. 2657 books. http://www.icdlbooks.org/
Economic and law books in PDF format. Designated for non-commercial use only. Number of books unknown, but likely several hundred. http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html
Collection of peer-reviewed books from Ohio State University. Over 50 books. All rights reserved. http://www.ohiostatepress.org/index.htm?/books/openaccess.htm
Open access texts, searchable with several different kinds of queries. Does require some time to sort through search results. Over 28,000 books and documents. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/genpub/
Collection of books, specializing in Latin American studies. 39 books available. All rights reserved. http://digital.library.pitt.edu/p/pittpress/
Sources
Exemplary Collection of Open eLearning Content Repositories. (2007, February 1). WikiEducator. Retrieved March 21, 2008, from http://wikieducator.org/Exemplary_Collection_of_Open_eLearning_Content_Repositories#General
OER Development and Publishing Initiatives. (2008, February 28). OER Wiki. Retrieved April 2, 2008, from http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=OER_development_and_publishing_initiatives
Repositories. (2008, February 13). OER Wiki. Retrieved April 2, 2008, from http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=Repositories
