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CCCS Faculty Toolkit

Resources and Services for Community College Faculty.

A graphic image that says: Find: Start finding OER

Finding OER

Finding OER: Start Small, End Big

Starting Small: Browsing Collections

The abundance of OER resources might seem daunting, so begin your search for open textbooks by starting small. If you know about an open textbook provider in your subject area or smaller curated collections that may have a textbook for your course, begin there instead of searching through larger indexes or repositories. For example, check out these smaller collections:

Textbooks

 

Ending Big: Searching

Once you have explored smaller collections, it's time to end big and broaden your scope by delving into larger OER databases and indexes. Luckily, there's an easy-to-use search tool developed and curated by a team at SUNY Geneseo called OASIS. Within OASIS, narrow your search by clicking "advanced search" and search by subject, or do a basic search and narrow the list by subject.

OASIS OER Search Tool

Other places to search for OER include:

OER Images & Icons

Images & Icons

Wikimedia Commons
Image and media repository; public domain and freely -licensed educational media content

Open Peeps
Hand-drawn illustrations; licensed CCO

EDUimages
Photo library of K12 students and educators; licensed CC BY-NC-SA

PICNOI
Stock photo library of diverse multi-racial images; licensed CC-BY

Disabled and Here
Photo collection features disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) across the Pacific Northwest; licensed CC-BY

UK Human Development Institute
Stock photo library that highlights disability representation; licensed CCO

Images of Empowerment
Photo library of women's activities from around the world; licensed CC-BY-NC

WOCinTech
Stock photos of women of color in tech; licensed CC-BY

Nappy
Image library of Black and brown people; licensed CCO

The Gender Spectrum
Stock photo collection featuring images of trans and non-binary models; licensed CC-BY-NC-ND

Disability:IN
Disability inclusive stock photography; licensed CC-BY-ND

AllGo
Collects stock photos featuring plus-size people in Unsplash (see Unsplash below)

Unsplash
All of the images you will find in this repository can be reused, modified, and shared for free; more information about the Unsplash license.

Noun Project
Creative Commons licensed icons.

Flickr Commons
Collection of historical photography from over 100 cultural institutions from around the world with no known copyright restrictions.

Public Domain
Collection of public domain art and design resources; licensed CCO

Smithsonian Open Access Images
Features images and data from across the Smithsonian's 21 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo; licensed CCO

Library of Congress: Free to Use and Reuse Sets
Repository of images; predominately public domain CCO

Openverse
A robust library of openly licensed and public domain stock photos, images, and audio.

Pixabay
A library of images that can be reused, modified, and shared for free, more information about the Pixabay license.

Google Image Search
From your search results, click on "Images", click "Tools", and then find the usage rights dropdown menu under search tools

Graphic image of Google Image search

 

Sharing your image

Before your image is ready to share, you will probably need to complete two more steps.

  1. Add an attribution statement with the creator, title, link, and license information of the work
  2. Add alt text to the image metadata so that the image can be understood by screen reader users.

This helpful Open Attribution builder can help you create attributions for openly licensed materials that you reuse.

OER Film & Video

Film & Video

PublicResourcesOrg
Collection of government videos under the public domain.

VideoLectures.Net
An free, open-access educational video lectures repository; licensed CC-BY-NC-ND

Pexels Videos
A collection of free stock videos; more information about the Pexels license.

Creative Commons on Vimeo
Browse all videos with a Creative Commons license arranged by attribution permissions.

Who Uses What?

Information on individuals and institutions who have found success with openly licensed works.