All Guides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Home

Open Educational Resources (OER) are free materials for teaching and learning that can be reused and/or modified (based on the creative commons copyright license). Resources may include textbooks, articles, videos, and other multimedia materials.

Open Access (OA) is access to scholarly material such as publications, journals, and articles. The material is free to use depending on the creative commons license. They cannot be modified; however.

The resources provided in this guide are a mix of OER and OA resources. The main difference between Open Educational Resources and Open Access Resources is whether material can or cannot be modified; both models are openly available to use.

Licensed Resources are ebooks, journals, articles, documents, films, and primary sources purchased and curated by the Stanley Library to support teaching, learning, and research at Ferrum College.

Mason OER Metafinder

The OER Metafinder performs a simultaneous search across 19 different sources of open educational materials. Because it is a real-time, federated search, it can take a bit longer than searches of pre-indexed, curated content; however, as compensation the results returned are absolutely up-to-the-minute for each search target. Additional results will continue to trickle in as the search continues running and you begin examining your results.

Textbook and Mixed Media Repositories

Open Textbook Library
Endorsed by the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) and associated with the Open Textbook Network, this is a highly-regarded open textbook repository.
OpenStax
From Rice University. Peer-reviewed and openly licensed.
Flickr: Creative Commons
Search or browse images across Creative Commons license types.

Creation Tools

Pressbooks
Book writing software that lets you create a book in multiple formats, including CreateSpace, IngramSpark and Lightning Source.
Guides on OER Creation Tools
A sizable list from the University of Pittsburgh Library System and part of an excellent guide to OER.

Creative Commons Licensing

Creative Commons Licensing
Clear, concise explanation of Creative Commons Licenses from the source.
Creative Commons Search
Search across multiple media sites for CC-licensed content. Includes image searching.

Open Access Databases & Websites

Below are just a few of the databases containing open access books, articles, government documents, technical reports, gray literature, white papers, and more that you can use to support teaching and learning at Ferrum College.

Licensed Resources

To the right are only few of the licensed resources the library makes available. Some are subscription resources, but some are purchased collections that the library owns. Contact us for more information.

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB)
A digital collection of over 5,400 seminal books in the humanities and related social sciences. These titles are presented in collaboration with more than 120 publishers and Michigan Publishing. Books in the HEB collection have been recommended and reviewed by scholars and constituent learned societies of the American Council of Learned Societies.
Behavioral Science and Psychology Collection (Springer eBooks) This link opens in a new window
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Hundreds of e-books in the fields of psychology and behavioral science.
Early English Books Online (EEBO)
Early Modern Books covers material from the British Isles and Europe for the period 1450-1700. An integrated search across both Early English Books Online and Early European Books allows scholars to view materials from over 225 source libraries worldwide. EEBO's content draws on authoritative short-title catalogues of the period and features many text transcriptions specially created for the product. Content from Europe covers the curated Early European Books Collections from 4 national libraries and London's Wellcome Library.
eBook Academic Collection
eBooks on the EBSCO platform.
eBooks from ABC-CLIO
Over 3,000 eBooks from the publisher ABC-Clio and Greenwood press.
JSTOR at Ferrum This link opens in a new window
Search Ferrum's JSTOR subscriptions including: JSTOR Arts and Sciences Archive, Ecology & Botany I Archive, JSTOR Free Early Journal Content, and Health & General Sciences Archive Collections.

Academic Video Online (Avon)
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Includes over 66,000 titles spanning the widest range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more.
Films on Demand This link opens in a new window
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Find streaming videos in every subject area.
Alternative Proxy Link
Swank Video
Individual streaming titles requested by Ferrum College Faculty.

The Stanley Library subscribes to thousands of journals through full-text databases, but linking to them can be arduous. One terrific method is to use the Full Text Finder tool, which will redirect your students to the full text of subscription content, regardless of where the article is actually stored.

1) Click the Advanced Search on the OneSearch Tool

2) Click Citation Finder

3) Enter the Citation Information or, if you have the DOI or PMID, even better!

4) Click Submit

5) Copy the URL and paste it into Brightspace

Note: To assure success off-campus, make sure you include the proxy information in your link.

Questions? Contact us!

NOTE: To assure that the resource is available from off campus, be sure to prepend the library's proxy server information like so: https://ezproxy.ferrum.edu/login?url=http://resolver.ebscohost.com/openurl/?rft_id=info:ofi/nam:info:pmid:10117372