Resources to Find Open Textbooks

The Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative encourages faculty experimentation and innovation in finding new, better, and less costly ways to provide learning materials to students. Contact us if you are not sure what is available in your field or are not sure where to start.

Below is a list of open educational resources that might be suitable for your application. If you need to modify one of these resources to fit your needs, please see Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know.

Open Textbooks Created by K-State Faculty

Communicating in Everyday Chinese (Li Yang), Chinese 101 - 502
Your Journey to First-Year Success: A K-State First Companion Textbook (Brent Weaver, Mandi McKinley,Reagan Swank, Cydney Alexis,Tara Coleman, Jaime DeTour, Jessica Preston Kerr, Cheryl Rauh, R J. Youngblood, and Mariya Vaughan)
Principles of Biology (Robert Bear, David Rintoul, Bruce Snyder, Martha Smith-Caldas, Christopher Herren, Eva Horne) Biology 198
Additional textbooks published by New Prairie Press

Open Educational Resources Repositories

OASIS (SUNY’s Openly Available Sources Integrated Search) is a tool that searches for OER content from more than 70 sources.

Both of these repositories contain open textbooks along with a wealth of other open educational resources.

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT)

Have you tried MERLOT’s ISBN search tool? Find a commercial textbook on a topic, enter the ISBN, and MERLOT will show you open content on the topic.

Open Educational Resource (OER) Commons

Open Textbook Libraries or Collections

In addition to MERLOT and OER Commons, the following sites offer open textboooks:

The American Institute of Mathematic Open Textbook Initiative - Contains links to open textbooks that meet AIM’s evaluation criteria.

BCcampus OpenEd - Find or adapt textbooks that are openly licensed for reuse in 40 subject areas.

Boundless Courses - This catalog contains educational content originally curated by Boundless. Subjects include: Accounting, Art, Biology, Business, Chemistry, Communication, English, History, Mathematics, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology.

College Open Textbooks Collaborative - A collection of twenty-nine education organizations that are focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks. They offer training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that support for authors opening their resources, and other services.

LibreText - begun at the University of California, Davis, LibreText offers resources across twelve disciplines (almost 400 items) and has dozens of contributing institutions.

Open Course Library - Textbooks, syllabi, assessments, in 81 high-enrollment college courses created by a Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges (SBCTC) grant.

Open Stax College - Through grant funding, Open Stax College is producing free open textbooks for high enrollment college courses using the ConneXions platform. Subjects include: College Physics, Introduction to Sociology, Biology, Concepts of Biology, and Anatomy and Physiology.

Open SUNY Textbooks - A collection of Open Educational Resources (OER) adopted across SUNY.

The Orange Grove - Florida’s digital repository, contains links to a variety of open textbooks.

The University of Minnesota Open Education Initiative - UM created a catalog of open textbooks and is providing $500-$1000 stipends for faculty members to review and adopt these resources.

Wikibooks - A collection of open-content textbooks built on a Wikipedia-like platform.

Textbook Accessibility Resources

BC Open Textbook Accessbility Toolkit - The Accessibility Toolkit provides the needed resources for each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create a truly open and accessible textbook -- one that is free and accessible for all students.

Digital Accessibility in Canvas - See the sidebar menu for accessibility information and how-to's for creating accessible PowerPoints, Webpages, PDFs, and more, all applicable whether you are posting to your Canvas courses or to other online platforms.

Courses

"Adopting Open Textbooks" Peer-to-Peer University, 2015. (Not an active course, but content is archived.) Includes the following learning outcomes:

Find, evaluate, modify and adopt an open textbook
Build your network by finding and connecting with educators interested in open education and open textbook
Define and describe the following terms: open education, open educational resources (OER) and open textbooks
Explain why open education is important
Identify problems that open textbooks may address
Correctly identify Creative Commons licenses and use them appropriately in the context of open textbooks
Identify common challenges for faculty who want to use open textbooks and define strategies to help mitigate those challenges.