Reusing OER developed by others is one of the major goals of SkillsCommons. Anyone engaged in workforce development can save time, money, and effort by reusing the existing OER in SkillsCommons and in other OER collections available on the web.
To help you find more OER, we, along with Creative Commons, created a “one stop shop” for OER resources on SkillsCommons.
SkillsCommons’ “One-Stop-Shop” for OER Collections
Finding more free and open resources with MERLOT
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching at www.merlot.org) is a free and open online library of over 92,000 free and open educational resources, with over 37,000 with a Creative Commons license. MERLOT is administered and led by the California State University since 1997 and has over 500 higher education institutions represented in the system and campus partners within the MERLOT Consortium. MERLOT’s over 168,000 individual members continue to build the collection, with over 600 faculty, students, librarians, staff, administrators, consultants, healthcare professionals, and content developers joining for free per month.
You can find a wide range of online materials of different types (22) – animations, assessment tools, learning assignments, mobile apps, collections, simulations, tutorials, as well as free and open textbooks and free and open courseware at www.merlot.org. The “What Is Merlot?” YouTube video provides you a walk through the website.
MERLOT provides a variety of services and portals for finding and reusing free and open educational resources.
MERLOT Resources for Finding and Reusing Existing Free and Open Educational Resources:
- Smart Search with MERLOT not only searches its own collection of over 92,000 resources but simultaneously searches over 70 other free and open online libraries and searches the World Wide Web using a custom Google search rubric to identify educationally relevant resources.
- Virtual Labs: The MERLOT portal provides easy access to virtual labs and simulations in STEM disciplines. The portal also includes teaching ePortfolios of faculty and case studies adopting virtual labs in their courses.
- MERLOTx is MERLOT’s student-centered portal created to help students easily find resources to support their learning goals. It is designed to make it easy for students to browse their way through the entire MERLOT collection to find the free learning resources they need.
- Mobile Apps MERLOT is a FREE, open online collection of over 11,000 downloadable mobile apps for iOS (Apple), Android, and Windows smart-phones and tablets that connects you to an open online community of learners and teachers from around the world and IT’S FREE TO JOIN.
- Affordable Learning Solutions is a website focused on free and open textbooks, with over 7,500 free etextbooks within the MERLOT collection and over 700 fully online open courseware in SkillsCommons. The website also provides teaching ePortfolios for faculty showcasing how they use open textbooks in their courses as well as showcasing general education courses with free and open textbooks related to the courses along with faculty reviews of the quality of the etextbooks.
