Open Educational Resources: Home

Tips for Getting Started Designing for Web Accessibility: This page introduces some basic considerations to help you get started making your user interface design and visual design more accessible to people with disabilities. These tips are good practice to help you meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) requirements. 

Pressbooks: The Open Book Creation Platform:  Pressbooks is simple book production software, built with the web in mind.  Create interactive web books, PDFs for print and ebooks, all from one place. See VIVA information above.

For more information or questions about Open Educational Resources, contact the Scholarly Communications Department at the Jerry Falwell Library.  Scholarlycommunications@liberty.edu

 VIVA Open Grants 

VIVA Open Course Grants are designed to empower Virginia faculty with the resources and time they need to design or update courses to include open, no cost, or library materials. Open Course Grant recipients are awarded $2,000 - $30,000 to adopt, adapt, or create a resource and pilot them in a course by spring, 2025.

Faculty members at any VIVA institution, full or part-time, may apply. Proposals may involve one person or teams that include: teaching faculty, librarians, instructional designers, subject matter experts, editors, graphic designers, or others as needed. Multi-institutional teams are particularly encouraged. 

More information, including the full Request for Proposals and application instructions, are available at https://vivalib.org/va/open/grants/course.  A list of past grant recipients can also be found on that page.

 *VIVA is funded by the Virginia General Assembly and VIVA member institutions, and is sponsored by the State Council of Higher Education (SCHEV). 

These are good resources to find items that are peer-reviewed.  This is a place to start looking for an OER for class use.

VIVA Pressbooks

VIVA Pressbooks are items created within Virginia. 

OpenStax 

OpenStax is part of Rice University, which is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit charitable corporation. Generously supported by major philanthropic foundations, allows OpenStax research team to conduct cutting-edge research on student learning and improve student success through their resources. 

• Openly license, 100% free, and adaptable textbooks.
• Expert Authors: these open-source textbooks are written by professional content developers who are experts in their fields.
• Standard Scope and Sequence: all textbooks meet the standard scope and sequence requirements, making them seamlessly adaptable into existing courses. 
• Peer-Reviewed: OpenStax textbooks undergo a rigorous peer-review process. A list of contributors is available with each book.

Creative Commons has items that under copyright but the author has given a license to allow the user to know how they can use the resource .

Creative Commons – a collection of Creative Commons licensed materials.

1. General OER Searching.
2. Photo/Image Search.
3. Video Search.
4. Audio/Music Search.
5. General Education Search.
6. Recorded Lectures & Video Tutorial Search.
7. Open Textbook Search.
8. Simulation and Animation Search.
9. Modular Course Components.
10. Completed Courses.

Teaching Commons – a collection of OERs available through Liberty University Scholars Crossing Institutional Repository, the Digital Commons platform.

Pressbooks Directory - this directory provides an index of OER books published by faculty and librarians who use Pressbooks in higher education. 

These are sites that have cataloged different OER for use in classrooms.

• VIVA Open - Virginia's Academic Library Consortium OER resource.
• OER Commons – a search engine that makes various OERs of different levels discoverable.
• OpenStax – an initiative of Rice University with support from foundations like Hewlett and the Gate’s Foundation (peer-reviewed).
• MIT Open Courseware – openly published MIT course content that covers the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
• MERLOT – a project of the California State University System, contains links to open textbooks from a variety of sources (peer review indicators).
• BCcampus OpenEd – a collection of open textbooks created by BCcampus.
• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) – a collection of peer-reviewed open access books with Creative Commons licenses.
• InTech – an open access publisher of books and journals in science, technology, and medicine.
• Libre Texts – a multi-institutional collection of higher learning textbooks.
• Open Education Network – an aggregation of openly licensed textbooks.
• Open TextBook Store – a catalog of open textbooks collected by educators to make open textbooks more easily adoptable in courses.
• OpenStax CNX– an extension of OpenStax, a repository of open-access textbooks and curricular materials.
• OpenCourse Library - a collection of expertly developed OER courses for Washington State Community Colleges'.
• Nordic University Health Hub - OER on Health.

The links below are available to use for class.  Please review the site to see if it fits your needs.

Anatomy and Physiology

Virtual Fetal Pig Dissection - Whitman College Biology Department.

Astronomy

Nebraska Astronomy Applet Project - Undergraduate introductory online labs.

SkyServer DR16 - Sloan Digital Sky Survey

GEAS Project - Distance education laboratory 

PlanetMaker

Engineering

Energy 3D - Learning to Build a Sustainable World from a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Flowsquare - Free computational fluid dynamics software.

GNURadio - Free & open-source software to implement software radios.

Scilab - Free and open-source software for engineers and scientists.

Reactor Lab - Interactive simulations of chemical reactors for active learning.

Virtual Labs - Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Open Simulation Interface - OSI file format.

Verilator - Verilog/SystemVerilog simulator.

Engineering
Open Textbooks for Engineering

Environmental Science

DataONE - Environment and Earth.

Epidemiology

ActivEpi Web by David G. Kleinbaum, 2015.

Geology

PhET Interactive Simulations for math and science. 

Teaching Geoscience Online - Finding lab activities online.

Jules Verne Voyager - Map manipulative.

Physical Geology 101 - Richard Harwood 2018.

NOVA interactives through PBS.

Virtual Microscope for Earth Sciences  

Microbiology

Public Health Image Library (PHIL) from CDC.

General Microbiology Labs - Sponsored by the University of Wyoming.

Neuroscience

Neuroscience Labs - Modular Digital Course in Undergraduate Neuroscience Education at UCLA.

Allen Institute for Brain Science - open data and resources.

Build Your Own Brain - Use? button for assistance.

Physics

Molecular Workbench - Visual, Interactive Simulations for Teaching & Learning Science.

Physics Simulations - Customize and share.

CK-12 Exploration Series - Physics and Chemistry Simulations.

The Physics Classroom - For beginning physics students and teachers.

Open Source Physics 

oPhysics: Interactive Physics Simulations

Datasets

USGS - Science datasets

WOLFRAM Demonstration Projects - Creative Commons Attribution—NonCommercial—ShareAlike 3.0. 

DATA.GOV - U.S. Government open data.

National Science Foundation - Statistics.