How to Find OER for Education Courses

This post was contributed by Jennifer Lantrip, Health Sciences Student Success Librarian, Pacific University. Jennifer is the Research Consultant on the Open Oregon Educational Resources K12-Higher Ed Connections for OER Grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The goal of the grant is to prepare future K12 teachers to be open educators who can leverage open practices to customize their curriculum and better represent and support the students in the classroom while aligning with Oregon standards.

Are you looking for open educational resources for your education courses? We’re sharing open educational resources we’ve found for faculty who teach courses for preservice teachers. More importantly, we’re sharing tips for finding them since there are always new open educational resources being published and this list will be outdated the minute it’s published.

OER Recommendations for Preservice Faculty

OER Recommendations for Preservice Faculty is a compilation of OER recommended to preservice faculty for this grant project. Each resource is tagged by topic and the courses it was recommended for are included. If you’re looking for a specific topic, such as social emotional learning, try filtering the Topics column or searching the spreadsheet. However, this spreadsheet won’t be updated after spring 2027, so the best way to find open educational resources will be to search.

Finding OER for Education Courses

The following are suggestions for where and how to find OER for education courses.

Where to search	Search tips
Resources page from Open Oregon Educational Resources	Find OER that have been adopted by Oregon faculty. Try filtering to the Discipline of Education or searching for a particular keyword, (e.g., early childhood). If you teach with OER and don’t see your course listed, use this short form to submit your own course materials!
OER Commons	Find all types of OER from full courses and textbooks to ancillary materials. Recommended search filters: Subject – Education and Educational Level – Adult Education, Career / Technical, College / Upper Division, Community College / Lower Division, and Graduate / Professional. Explore the Open Oregon Educational Resources – Preservice Teachers (K12) folder of completed OER course redesign projects by preservice faculty.
Open Textbook Library	Find full openly licensed textbooks. Suggest searching by keyword, but you can also browse by subject.
Oregon Open Learning	Open educational resources that preservice teachers can use in their classrooms, curated by the ODE. Suggest searching by keyword.
OER in Spanish and Other Languages	FAQ page that covers repositories to search course materials for Spanish speakers (not necessarily materials to learn Spanish). College of the Canyons has Spanish editions of Early Childhood Education textbooks.
Directory of Open Access Books	Repository of scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books. Often suited to upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses. Suggest searching by keyword.
Pressbooks Directory	Find openly licensed books created on the Pressbooks platform. Most OER here are findable via other repository searches such as the Open Textbook Library or OER Commons. Use the Directory to filter for attributes such as H5P interactives. Suggest searching by keyword.
LibreTexts	Find openly licensed books created or hosted on the LibreTexts platform. Suggest searching by keyword.
Web Search	Search for your topic and OER (e.g., foundations of education OER). Look for guides to finding discipline-specific OER, which often list specialized repositories.
Listservs	Find OER or guides to OER already shared on listservs or post to a listserv asking for help finding what you’re looking for. Two great options are the Open Oregon Google Group and the SPARC Open Education Forum.
Library resources	Find articles, books, book chapters, audio, and video from your institution’s library to use in your courses. Check with your librarians to see if it’s feasible for the library to provide access to resources they don’t already have. Always contact a librarian if you plan to use library resources as course materials to ensure that you won’t run into any snags when your entire class accesses the resource at once.

Ask Your Librarian

And, why do all of this searching on your own? Reach out to the librarian at your campus for help finding open educational resources for your course. It’s always better when we all put our heads together!

Course Redesign Resources for Preservice Faculty

Completed faculty course redesign projects from this grant are available in Open Oregon Educational Resources’ Preservice Teachers folder on OER Commons. Preservice faculty can find redesign resources in OER Course Design Resources for Preservice Faculty and in the 2024, 2025, and 2026 Preservice Faculty Convenings Materials, which include examples and presentations by preservice faculty.

	Unless otherwise noted, all content onOpen Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
	Higher Education Coordination Commission: Office of Community Colleges and Workforce Development

OER Recommendations for Preservice Faculty

Finding OER for Education Courses

Ask Your Librarian

Course Redesign Resources for Preservice Faculty

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