Open Educational Resources: History

College Open Textbooks is the initiative of a number of organizations who have made it their goal to provide free, open source textbooks online for students. Licenses vary. Verify individual items.

Europeana.eu is the EU digital platform for cultural heritage. More than 3,000 institutions across Europe have contributed to Europeana. These range from major international names like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Library and the Louvre to regional archives and local museums from every member of the European Union. Together, their assembled collections let users explore Europe's cultural and scientific heritage from prehistory to the modern day. Licenses vary. Verify individual items.

Hippocampus offers educators a wide variety of multimedia content online, including videos, animations, and simulations. An additional feature offers educators the ability to create "playlists" for their students, which correlate specifically to their particular instruction material. Site-specific license.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the forerunners in open courseware, making "virtually all MIT course content" available online for public access. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts. CC BY 3.0

The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.

Project Gutenberg offers over 50,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. We carry high quality ebooks: Our ebooks were previously published by bona fide publishers. We digitized and diligently proofread them with the help of thousands of volunteers. Mostly titles in the public domain. Some copyrighted titles are included, for which permission for unlimited non-commercial worldwide use has been given.

The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures and significant historical documents on one site, in a variety of ways. Content on the WDL includes books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photographs, sound recordings, and films. Licenses vary. Verify individual items.

Open textbooks, syllabi, and supporting materials created under Affordable Learning Georgia OER grants. Materials are licensed under various Creative Commons licenses.

Search engine for open source primary sources, text books, and other open educational materials. Mason OER Metafinder looks at 15 leading OER repositories from a single query. Maintained by George Mason University and Deep Web Technologies.

MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community. The MERLOT Collection is made up of over 40,000 materials in 19 different material type categories.

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. Through OCW, educators improve courses and curricula, making their schools more effective; students find additional resources to help them succeed; and independent learners enrich their lives and use the content to tackle some of our world’s most difficult challenges, including sustainable development, climate change, and cancer eradication.

OER Commons helps educators, students, and lifelong learners avoid time-consuming searches and find exactly the right materials. With a single point of access from which they can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons’ growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER everyone can more efficiently find what they need.

The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts.

Open source textbooks that are written by professional content developers who are experts in their fields and undergo a rigorous peer review process. All textbooks meet standard scope and sequence requirements.

The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.

Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative working since 2008 to offer free and open online courses to all who want to learn. Whether you are looking for career advancement, degree completion, professional development, or more casual learning, we have something just for you.