Now is the Time for Open Educational Resources

Welcome to Ryerson University’s Now is the Time for Open Educational Resources. This resource lists a broad range of open educational resources (OER), primarily open textbooks, organized by academic programs taught at Ryerson University. OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that, through permissions granted by the copyright holder, allow others to use, distribute, keep, or make changes to them.

This guide was inspired by McMaster University’s OER by Discipline guide and by BCcampus’s OER by Discipline Directory. We are grateful to them for providing us with such wonderful examples to work from.

The version of the guide presented here was developed to highlight quality open textbooks and organize them so that Ryerson faculty can easily locate resources in their disciplines or subject areas. Although this is a good start, we are far from having a complete list and will be regularly updating this resource as we find additional, suitable materials to include. As this guide evolves, other OER — case studies, courses, games, simulations, videos, and more — may also be evaluated and added.

To locate materials, users may browse the contents or use the search box located in the top-right of each page in the online version to locate a specific subject.
We invite you to notify us if you discover a valuable OER within or related to your discipline. Please complete the following form to make your contribution.

We hope that Ryerson faculty and instructors will find this guide helpful as they consider the options available for quality, open textbooks for their courses.

Attribution information is provided for each title. If there is any discrepancy between the license information in this book and the license on the actual title, the license on the book takes precedence.

Introduction

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. —The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

OER present benefits to both learners and educators. They address inequities around affordability, access, learner retention and diversity and offer opportunities for creating, co-creating and re-mixing content to suit teaching and learning needs.

One of the barriers identified in faculty adoption and use of OER involves the time it takes to find suitable materials in their discipline Awareness and use of open educational resources (OER) in Ontario: A preliminary study of post-secondary educator perspectives [Research report].. This guide was developed to help alleviate this problem by creating a targeted OER list by discipline for Ryerson faculty and department use.

A project team, composed of members of the Ryerson Library and the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, found, evaluated and created this list of OER specifically geared to the Ryerson context. These OER primarily consist of peer-reviewed, open textbooks that are categorized and sorted by discipline. We are hoping that this guide will serve as a resource for faculty, and staff assisting faculty with their selection of course materials.

The guide will be revised as new resources become available.