Virginia's Academic Library Consortium

COVID-19: Openly Licensed Resources

COVID-19 has prompted a sudden transition to online teaching at academic institutions across Virginia. In an effort to consolidate resources, VIVA has put together this list of openly licensed materials. Unlike the temporary access to resources provided by vendors, these openly licensed materials will be available to use beyond the pandemic and instructors will not have to be concerned about losing access when the crisis is over.

General

COVID-19 Open Education Community Contributed Resources: A spreadsheet of open resources compiled by the open education community organized by CCCOER and Open Education Global to support educators, students, and their families in the transition to online and homebound schooling necessitated during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.

OER Toolkits

- Getting Started with OER: This VIVA Open collection contains toolkits and training intended to assist instructors in adopting, adapting, and/or creating OER.

OER Repositories & Referratories

- VIVA Open Curated Collections:  VIVA's OER Commons hosted website contains collections of OER suitable for higher education organized by subject discipline.

- Open Textbook Library: Books in the Open Textbook Library have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at a low cost. 

- Openstax: High-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print.

- LibreTexts: An easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of OER.

- B.C. Open Textbook Collection: A continuously updated open textbook collection in a variety of disciplines that have been reviewed by faculty, meet accessibility requirements, and/or include ancillary materials (quizzes, test banks, slides, videos, etc.).

- OER Commons Open Textbook Hub: An aggregated collection of open textbooks suitable for higher education from a variety of providers. Browse by subject or provider.

- Merlot: A free library of open educational resources and an authoring tool to create websites for online teaching.

- OpenSUNY Textbooks: A catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.

- American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) Open Textbook Initiative: AIM seeks to encourage the adoption of open source and open access mathematics textbooks. The AIM Editorial Board has developed evaluation criteria to identify the books that are suitable for use in traditional university courses. 

- Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI): CALI hosts and facilitates the creation of CALI Lessons, a library of over 1,000 interactive legal tutorials written by law professors and geared towards law students. In 2012, CALI began publishing open and free casebooks with the eLangdell® Press publishing wing.

- Skills Commons: A free and open digital library of workforce training materials.

Search Tools

- Mason OER Metafinder (MOM):  The OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across many different sources of open educational materials, including, but not limited to, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and the Digital Public Library of America.

- OASIS: Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records.

- CC (Creative Commons) Search: A search tool for finding openly licensed images.

Open Video Collections

- ALA Video Round Table (VRT) Open Video Collections Guide: The VRT maintains a guide of freely accessible collections of online videos.