Open Textbooks/Open Educational Resources: Supplement Your Study

Open Educational Resources (OER) are research, teaching, and learning materials that have been intentionally created and licensed to be free for others to access, use, keep, and in most cases, modify. Many OSU faculty and instructors have created and published OER, and even more are using them in their classrooms. You may not even know; OER are high quality, center faculty expertise, and can be contextualized to meet specific course expectations and learning environments. If you didn't have to purchase/rent/clear a bursar charge related to course materials, it is likely your instructor is using OER!

OER can be useful even when you have purchased required materials. Consider using OER as a supplementary resource to help you understand ideas and content introduced in your courses. Some OER have built-in assessments and practice exercises which can help you check your understanding of key concepts. You can access OER repeatedly, whenever you need to, using them over and over again until you have mastered your area of study.

Identify your learning or practice goals, and consider what type of materials will best help you work toward those goals. Have some key words in mind related to the course content, and use those terms in your search.

Where should you look? The Open Textbook Library, OpenStax, and the Pressbooks Directory are well respected and widely used.

Pressbooks Directory

The Pressbooks Directory collects and displays all public books created on PressbooksEDU networks (such as OpenOKState) in one searchable, filterable directory. Find practice exercises in Pressbooks Directory by filtering for books that include H5P. Faculty and instructors have created and shared these teaching, learning and research materials to help students connect with resources that match their study needs and learning preferences. Once on the home page, you can click the 'Take the Tour' button if you welcome guidance about how to navigate the site.

Open Textbook Library

The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Education Network, publishing OER created and used by faculty researchers in higher education. These resources have frequently been adopted and modified at a number of different institutions. The Open Education Network actively promotes these publications, which means authors and creators keep them relevant and up to date. OSU is a member institution -- you will find books by our own faculty and instructors included in this collection!

OpenStax

OpenStax is an educational initiative whose mission is to "transform learning so that education works for every student." This is a great place to look for traditional textbooks supporting large enrollment general education courses. These books are very widely used. They are also pretty comprehensive; you can find chapters covering about any general education topic addressed at OSU. You might find a textbook here for free that is the same as or similar to one available through commercial publishers. Take a look!

OERCommons and MERLOT are sites that can surface additional resources for you to consider using. You may discover projects underway, modules designed for use alongside other existing resources, and texts created to address niche topics.

OERCommons

OERCommons includes education subjects ranging from preschool to adult education to graduate school. Its directory listings are particularly strong for K12 subjects. This site includes assignments, exercises, and short lessons in addition to textbooks and complete courses.

MERLOT

The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Teaching Online (MERLOT) is fairly specific to higher education. Most of these resources have undergone peer review. You will also find advice and expertise about how to interact with the material.

These sites include full courses as well as subject area textbooks. Visit them to supplement your course of study, or even to explore something completely different just for fun!

MIT Open Courseware

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has used this site to share out course materials collected over many years. You will find entire course designs, lecture notes and texts, exercises, and examples from a wide range of courses.

OERU

This site includes university-level, asynchronous learning experiences that can be taken at no cost. Start and stop, dive into the middle, try whatever helps you the most.

Open Culture

Open Culture hosts a collection of textbooks covering many subject areas. It isn't comprehensive, but the site has interesting stuff.

Supplement Your Study © 2025 by Kathy Essmiller is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Portions have been modified from "Open Educational Resources (OER) Guide for Students in Post-Secondary and Higher Education" published by Commonwealth of Learning licensed CC BY 4.0. Linked material retains its original copyright and license.