LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: Adapting Resources

Adaptation of Existing Open Educational Resources (OER)

Several organizations/networks dedicated to OER have well established websites which provide a listing of available open textbooks and other resource material. Each site can be easily searched by field of study to find available open textbooks (eBooks) and other educational resources. The following is a partial list:

BCcampus
This digital library has an extensive range of subject matter and is a cooperative effort across Canada’s provinces to promote open education. In the area of engineering their collection contains only some programming textbooks. There are, however, numerous activity modules in solid mechanics.
LibreTexts
The LibraTexts Project, a multi-institutional collaborative to develop open-access texts, was initiated at the University of California Davis. LibraTexts provides an online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources in many areas. In mechanical engineering resources are available in the topical areas of mechanics, thermodynamics, and programming.
MERLOT
The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) is out of California State University Long Beach. It has a plethora of resources from textbooks to videos including overviews of topics and laboratory activities.
OER Commons
Created by ISKME, this digital library host hundreds of open resources including textbooks, lab activities, lectures, lecture notes, assignments, and assessment materials. This library contains resources in many fields. Engineering topics can be found through the search field.
OpenStax
Hosted by Rice University, OpenStax publishes quality, peer reviewed, openly licensed free online college textbooks. It contains many textbooks in business, math, humanities, social science, and basic science but no engineering textbooks were found. This site has LMS cartridges to integrate OER material into LMS systems like Canvas as part of its support of faculty.
The Open Textbook Library
Currently boasting over 1200 open textbooks, the digital library is a project of the Open Education Network out of the University of Minnesota. Many academic fields are covered. This site has about a dozen mechanical engineering textbooks in the areas of fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, manufacturing processes, statics, programming, and design.

Faculty interested in using existing OER materials will find a wide variety of available materials at these links. Adaptation of existing materials as an alternative to authoring provides many advantages as the desired content may already exist, or at least most of it. Even so, adaptation from several sources will likely prove to be time consuming process as one works to organize one’s course.

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If you have suggestions for how to make this page better, please contact Elizabeth Jerow, Assistant Library Director (jerow@msoe.edu).