Finding OER
SkillsCommons and Workforce OER
SkillsCommons is a free and open online library containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development. The Open Educational Resources (OER) are produced by community colleges across the nation and can be found, reused, revised, retained, redistributed and remixed by individuals, institutions, and industry.
Finding more free and open resources with MERLOT
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching at www.merlot.org) is a free and open online library. Almost 94,000 free and open educational resources, with over 37,000 with a Creative Commons license. MERLOT is administered and led by the California State University since 1997 and has over 4,000 member institutions represented in the system and campus partners within the MERLOT Consortium. MERLOT’s over 182,000 individual members continue to build the collection, with over 1,000 faculty, students, librarians, staff, administrators, consultants, healthcare professionals, content developers, and more joining for free per month.
You can find a wide range of online materials of different types (22) – animations, assessment tools, assignments, case study, collections, drill and practice, eportfolios, hybrid or blended courses, learning assignments, learning object repository, online courses, online modules, open (access) journal-articles, open (access) textbooks, presentations, quizzes/tests, reference materials, simulations, social networking tools, syllabi, tutorials, workshop and training materials, and free and open courseware at www.merlot.org.
The “What Is Merlot?” YouTube video provides you a walk through the website. MERLOT provides a variety of services and portals for finding and reusing free and open educational resources.
MERLOT Resources for Finding and Reusing Existing Free and Open Educational Resources:
- Smart Search with MERLOT not only searches its own collection of over 92,000 resources but simultaneously searches over 70 other free and open online libraries and searches the World Wide Web using a custom Google search rubric to identify educationally relevant resources.
- Virtual Labs: The MERLOT portal provides easy access to virtual labs and simulations in STEM disciplines. The portal also includes teaching ePortfolios of faculty and case studies adopting virtual labs in their courses.
- MERLOTx is MERLOT’s student-centered portal created to help students easily find resources to support their learning goals. It is designed to make it easy for students to browse their way through the entire MERLOT collection to find the free learning resources they need.
- Mobile Apps MERLOT is a FREE, open online collection of over 11,000 downloadable mobile apps for iOS (Apple), Android, and Windows smart-phones and tablets that connects you to an open online community of learners and teachers from around the world and IT’S FREE TO JOIN.
- Affordable Learning Solutions is a website focused on free and open textbooks, with over 7,500 free etextbooks within the MERLOT collection and over 700 fully online open courseware in SkillsCommons. The website also provides teaching ePortfolios for faculty showcasing how they use open textbooks in their courses as well as showcasing general education courses with free and open textbooks related to the courses along with faculty reviews of the quality of the etextbooks.
Open Educational Practices: Sharing Through ePortfolios
To advance open educational practices (OEP), MERLOT and SkillsCommons have designed this OEP portal to enable easy discovery and sharing of free, open, and exemplary collections of ePortfolios along with tools, templates, and guidelines that showcase open practices in higher education.
Moving Online
The COVID-19 pandemic required higher education to quickly transform their instruction to online modalities. MERLOT and SkillsCommons created OER portals to support the migration and these OER portal websites can be reused, revised, remixed, redistributed, and retained by institutions quickly and easily. Explore the open practice of adopting OER portals that can accelerate the migration of instruction from face-to-face to online formats.
Course Redesign with Technology
Over 700 faculty have authored open teaching ePortfolios on how they redesigned their courses with technology to improve student success. They captured their rational, the implementation, and their outcomes assessment in OER ePortfolios. Explore open practices for defining learning outcomes and redesigning teaching & learning activities.
Affordable Learning
Over 100 faculty have authored open ePortfolios about how and why they've adopted and taught with free and open etextbooks and resources to improve student success. The OER ePortfolios include course syllabi and cover a wide range of general education courses common in higher education. Explore open practices for adopting and teaching with OER.
Career & Technical Education
Explore this collection of over 50 open institutional, teaching, video, and podcast ePortfolios that tell stories about how and why community and technical colleges' created more innovative and successful learning and employability solutions for diverse populations of students. These open practices were funded by the U.S. Department of Labor's $1.9 billion TAACCCT program.
Learn More
Virtual Labs are various types of simulations that can substitute for "learning by doing" face-to-face/in-class activities, seen frequently in STEM laboratory courses. Faculty redesigned their lab courses with virtual labs and authored open teaching ePortfolios to describe their plans, implementation, and assessment of the student learning outcomes when teaching with virtual labs. Explore open practices for virtual labs in higher education.
Quality Assurance
MERLOT and SkillsCommons offers an open quality assurance program for online and blended education that has been adopted by higher ed institutions. Campus staff authored open institutional ePortfolios describing their plans, implementation, and outcomes of their quality assurance programs. Explore our open instruments, open professional development resources, and open examplars of quality on online instruction can be models for adopting effective practices for designing, implementing and evaluating quality online instruction.
Sharing Open Educational Practices with ePortfolios and More!
Open educational practices need to be easily captured and retained with free and open tools that enable others to reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute.
- MERLOT's Content Builder tool is a free and open authoring tool for faculty, students, and staff to create open teaching, learning, and institutional ePortfolios and MERLOT hosts the ePortfolios for free in the open MERLOT library. Anyone with an email address and internet access can become a MERLOT member (it's free) and use the MERLOT Content Builder as well as many other of MERLOT's Open Educational Services to share open educational practices.
- SkillsCommons provides open storytelling guidelines and a rubric for evaluating the quality and power of stories to capture the open educational practices that produced personal and institutional outcomes.
OER come in a wide variety of types. Many educators are simply looking for individual media elements to use within their courses, such as photos, graphics, videos, and audio, that are openly licensed in a way that freely permits education use. Other educators are looking for online curriculum modules to augment their courses, complete etextbooks to replace a publisher’s textbook or curriculum for the complete coursework (call open courseware).
The “one-stop-shop” of OER collections is meant to provide users easy access to the wide range of OER collections. Explore and reuse the OER!
SkillsCommons’ “One-Stop-Shop” for OER Collection
How to find Creative Commons (CC) licensed resources
The following videos provide a demonstration on how to find CC-licensed videos, images, course material, and open textbook using some known websites offering openly licensed content.
Finding a CC-licensed video
In this video, learn how to find a CC-licensed video in YouTube, Vimeo, and Khan Academy.
"Finding CC Licensed Video" by Linda Williams, available under a CC BY license
Finding a CC-licensed image
Learn how to find a CC-licensed image or photo with Flickr, and Google Images
"How to Find & Attribute CC-Licensed Images with Flickr" by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, available under a CC BY license
"Locating Creative Commons Images using Google Images' Advanced Search" by Nicole Piasecki, available under a CC BY license
Finding a CC-licensed course material using Skills Commons
Image | Description |
| Open your browser and head to http://www.skillscommons.org The image you see on the left is the homepage of Skills Commons. You can search using the search bar found at the top right of the screen, or browse by industry, or by grant project found at the bottom center of the page. |
| For this tutorial, we'll use the search bar. Type a keyword and click on Go. In the image on the left, we used the keyword "welding" to find materials that are related to the word welding. |
| A list of related materials populate the page. On the left side, you will see a column with different material types. You can click a specific one if you want to filter the results based on material type. |
| In this example, we will use the material titled "Basic Welding Module - Reusabe Learning Object" tutorial by Western Nevada College. Click on the name title to find out more about the item. |
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The item description page loads up, and you'll more details about the item, and links for you to click to download it. Most will list the required software/program that you may need to have instaled on your computer to open the item. If you scroll down on the item description page, you can also see the license information at the bottom. This material is licensed CC BY 4.0 (not seen in image), which means you are free to share, remix, transform, and build upon the material as long as you attribute and give credit to the creator. and provide a link to the license and note if changes were made. |
