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Open Educational Resources (OER)

Finding OER Can Be Tough

Here's Why (and How We Can Help)

One of the biggest challenges with using Open Educational Resources (OER) is simply finding them.

While there’s a lot of great OER out there, they’re not always easy to discover, especially through a regular Google search. Sometimes they’re buried deep in the results, mislabeled, or missing the metadata that helps search engines find them. Even creators with the best intentions might not tag their content correctly or share it in a place that’s widely known.

This concise 6-minute video guides educators on the proven strategies for discovering and assessing Open Educational Resources (OER). Presented under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0), it outlines a practical four-step process:

  1. Choose relevant keywords that align with your course objectives.

  2. Search trusted OER repositories and aggregators.

  3. Evaluate resources using criteria like accessibility, currency, and adaptability.

  4. Reflect on what you've found and decide how it fits your teaching context. 

Where We Find OER

In these repositories, you can find OER created by others and ready for your use or adaptation, including textbooks, lesson plans, syllabi, videos, images, and more. Browse these repositories by subject or search for materials using relevant keywords. 

Our Go-To Repositories 

  • OER Commons: One of the largest OER repositories, which covers multiple disciplines and allows for sorting by education level, reuse options, and by standard
  • OERTX: OER repository from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board
  • MERLOT II: This repository offers a wide range of disciplines and variety of material types
  • OASIS: A search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier by searching multiple sources for OER and other open content at once. OASIS currently searches for open content from 79 different sources and contains approximately 330,000 records.
  • OER Metafinder: Simultaneously searches multiple repositories, could give you good ideas of other repositories to look in
  • The Open Textbook Library is a great resource for finding open textbooks. If you want a textbook and nothing more, this is the place to start.
  • OpenStax: High quality textbooks for introductory level college courses
  • BCCampus Open Textbooks collects resources created, reviewed, or adopted by instructors at British Columbia universities. Materials can be filtered by Accessibility as well as whether they have been adopted by BCCampus courses, include ancillary materials, or have been reviewed by faculty.

Explore our OER Repository Master List

To save you time, we’ve created a living directory (below) of OER discovery tools and collections. You can:

  • Browse the full list

  • View our top UTA OER recommendations

  • Filter by discipline or resource type to find exactly what you need

We’re always adding new finds, so check back often!

Need Help Finding the Right Fit? 

Looking for something specific or feeling stuck? We offer OER Matchmaking—a personalized support service to help you find open resources that align with your course, topic, or teaching goals. Just tell us what you’re looking for, and we’ll do the digging for you.

How It Works

1. Fill Out and Submit the Form
Start by completing the OER Matchmaking form with your course or project details.
2. We Search Broadly
The OER Team conducts a preliminary scan across 10–15 major OER repositories, plus a wide search using Google and Google Scholar.
3. You Get a Personalized Tracker

We share a custom OER Tracker Spreadsheet with you. This includes:

  • Tab 1: Search Results – Links to the searches we ran, along with the number of results each search produced. (We don’t select individual resources for you—only you can decide what’s a good fit.)

    • Screenshot of Search Results in OER Tracker

  • Tab 2: Resource Tracker – A place to log and review any materials you explore. Jot down your first impressions as you go. Those initial thoughts are critical—once your list grows, you won’t want to backtrack to re-review everything.

    • Screenshot of Tracker Tab

4. Built-In License Support
The tracker includes a license dropdown. Choose the license you find on a resource or select “unknown.” The next column auto-fills what that license allows.
5. Need More Help?
If you want support interpreting results or using the tracker, schedule an OER Project Support meeting and we will help.

*The OER Team will begin processing OER Matchmaking requests September 15th, 2025! We appreciate your patience.