Psychology & Behavioral Sciences: Open Educational Resources (OERs)

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Feb. 13, 2014) — Open access to information is the goal of higher education, and several members of the University of Kentucky Department of Psychology faculty are participants in an innovative project designed to bring free, up-to-date texts to students. Headed by University of Illinois professors Ed and Carol Diener, the website Nobaproject.com gives instructors and their students access to customized psychology content written by top experts in the field. 120 authors, including seven members of the UK faculty, put together more than 80 chapters in 11 psychology topic areas. All content is completely free, and allows instructors to customize texts by selecting only those chapters pertinent to the goals of the class. See: http://uknow.uky.edu/content/uk-psychology-faculty-participate-open-source-textbook-project

Excellent courses in brain and cognitive sciences from MIT

Good source of peer-reviewed content, including open textbooks and other scholarly materials

This is a large clearinghouse for open access courses

For excellent math textbooks useful for university students, see these resources from AIM, includes statistics

Search for open access psychology textbooks and other useful OERs

MERLOT is a California State University initiative where a search of the academic discipline or subfield will yield many OA learning materials. Under "materials" a searcher may restrict results to "open textbooks."

OER Commons offers a comprehensive infrastructure for curriculum experts and instructors at all levels to identify high-quality OER and collaborate around their adaptation, evaluation, and use to address the needs of teachers and learners. Diving into OER Commons is an exciting opportunity to collaborate with other educators and learners, at the forefront of a new educational era.

Free and openly licensed textbooks in use by some universities; see psychology example at https://openstax.org/details/psychology

You can ensure that ALL of your students will have access to your course textbook content. In addition, you can edit the textbooks to fit your courses and best meet the needs of your students. Open textbooks are real, complete textbooks licensed so teachers and students can freely use, adapt, and distribute the material. Open textbooks can be downloaded for no cost, or printed inexpensively. This library is a tool to help instructors find affordable, quality textbook solutions. All textbooks in this library are complete and openly licensed. Partner: U. Minnesota

The Open Textbook Network (OTN) helps higher education institutions and systems advance the use of open textbooks and practices on their campuses.
We maintain the Open Textbook Library, the premiere resource for peer-reviewed academic textbooks. All of our textbooks are free, openly licensed, and complete; their adoption creates a measurable, positive impact on student success.
With our members, we move the open education conversation forward on local and national levels. Many research universities are part of the OTN. Rutgers is a member of OTN.

Use this list of sources for free textbooks in teaching courses or for background reasing

Large catalog of open access textbooks with printing options

This guide gives a very comprehensive but accessible guide to the subject of OERs. See info for both educators and learners, some good videos too.