Library Blog
Open Content for Courses
American Anthropological Association (Uncertain License)
The American Anthropological Association allows for instructors to submit and exchange their course materials through their Teacher Exchange, predominantly syllabi. These materials come from a variety of anthropological courses, and are just one of many resources available for teachers to use. The site does not specifically state the licensing for these materials.
Carnegie Mellon- Open Learning Initiative (CC BY NC SA 3.0)
Carnegie Mellon offers courseware online, in addition to complete courses as well. Its mission is to improve higher education by offering such resources online.
EDSITEment! (Uncertain License)
EDSITEment! provides free online lesson plans for educators in the humanities. It is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities, Verizon Foundation, and the National Trust for the Humanities. Additionally, it is a member of the Thinkfinity Consortium of premier educational websites.
Engineering Pathway (Uncertain License)
Engineering Pathway provides online courseware in a variety of categories, including computing, engineering, life sciences, and mathematics.
John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (CC BY NC SA)
Johns Hopkins provides open courseware in a variety of topics, including adolescent health; cancer, chronic diseases; infectious diseases; and mental health, amongst many others.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Site-Specific Permissions)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides online course materials for educators to use. They are related to a wide variety of topics and regions, and individual units can be downloaded as pdfs.
MIT Open Courseware (CC BY NC SA)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the forerunners in open courseware, making "virtually all MIT course content" available online for public access.
Monterey Bay Institute - Hippocampus (Site-Specific Permissions)
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.
OCW Search (Item-Specific Licensing)
OCW Search is a search engine that sorts through materials from 10 institutions by topic, specific keyword, or professor. These institutions are: Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, MIT, Notre Dame, The Open University UK, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (Spanish courses), Stanford Engineering Everywhere, Delft University of Technology (English and Dutch courses), UMass Boston, The University of Tokyo (English and Japanese collections), and Yale University. Each school has their own license, so attention must be paid to the individual source regarding permissions.
Open Course Library (CC BY 3.0)
The Open Course Library offers educators the ability to "Download. Remix. Teach." a wide variety of open courseware- including syllabi, activities, readings, and assessments. In addition, it offers some low-cost textbooks for adoption (less than $30).
Open Education Consortium (CC BY 3.0)
The Open Education Consortium is a database that hundreds of institutions contribute to. It houses almost 25,000 courses from 77 providers, offering educators access to syllabi, course calendars, reading lists, and study materials, amongst others.
Open Learn (Site-Specific Permissions)
Open Learn is an initiative of The Open University, UK. It provides supplemental materials for educators, including articles, podcasts, videos, games, and much more. In addition, it offers more than 700 free online classes.
Penn State- Earth and Mineral Sciences (CC BY NC SA)
Penn State provides Open Educational Resources through their College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. Topics of these materials include, but are not limited to, Geography, Meteorology, Geosciences, and Materials Science and Engineering.
Saylor Academy (CC BY 3.0)
Saylor Academy offers a variety of free online courses for users in K-12 and in higher education. Its university-level courses are typically designed to be aligned with for-credit examinations (such as CLEP tests), and the courses are created and vetted by educational professionals.
UC Berkeley (Site-Specific Permissions)
University of California, Berkeley offers a wide variety of its lectures for free online to students around the world.
University of Massachusetts - Boston
UMass provides a variety of its courseware online for educators to use. Topics of these materials include Environmental, Earth, and Ocean Sciences; along with History, Mathematics, and others.
University of Michigan (CC BY 3.0)
University of Michigan has an extensive database of open educational resources that are freely and openly licensed for teaching, learning, and research purposes.