From Merlot, to Flatworld, to OpenStax, below is a list of many of the popular options for finding free and low-cost textbook options for your course.
“Free textbooks…developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course.” Learn more.
“A curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.” Learn more.
“OER Commons helps educators, students, and lifelong learners avoid time-consuming searches and find exactly the right materials.” Learn more.
“Provides affordable course materials designed to strengthen learning using open educational resources (OER). Lumen’s OER course materials are engineered to improve subject mastery, course completion and retention.” Learn more.
Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. Learn more.
“MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.” Learn more.
“BNED Courseware is an innovative new offering that lowers the cost of learning materials for a full suite of introductory courses, and assures frictionless first day of class delivery. ” Learn more.
OUP has been publishing OA content since 2004. Since that time, ‘gold’ OA has grown dramatically and proven effective in some disciplines. Learn more.
“Educators have access to our extensive collection of peer-reviewed content and open educational resources (OER) — with the option to edit down to the word.” Learn more.
“Bookboon’s free online textbooks for students are focused and to the point. They are all written by highly respected professors from top universities in the world and cover topics such as economics, statistics, IT, engineering and natural science.” Learn more.
“panOpen is a platform that enables mainstream institutional adoption of Open Educational Resources as an alternative to commercial textbooks. It provides faculty with turnkey peer-reviewed content, tools for customization, assessment, and analytics, and a means of financially sustaining campus-based OER efforts, allowing faculty to lower costs and improve learning outcomes.” Learn more.
“The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is a grant-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University, offering innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. Our aim is to create high-quality courses and contribute original research to improve learning and transform higher education.” Learn more.
The SUNY system has a strong history of openness and instructional innovation, including using OER to provide measurable impact on student success. Learn more.
The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation. Learn more.
“Independent publisher of college textbooks and supplemental student study aids (digital and print). At Academic Media Solutions, we passionately believe that the time has finally come for an entirely new and innovative approach for educational publishing.” Learn more.