Open Educational Resources: OER Tools

Developed by Open Commons, Open Author can create and customize open educational resources to meet your needs and the needs of your learners.
You can use Open Author to create resources with both instructor and student facing views. This means that instructors can view the resource that is customized for instruction, and students can view the resource that is customized for their learning needs.

Free, open source application used to create flowcharts and other kinds of charts and diagrams.

The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER).

GitBook is the online platform to create and host books built using the GitBook format. It offers hosting, collaboration features and an easy-to-use editor.

An Open Source office suite comparable to Microsoft Office. Document editing, spreadsheets, charts, presentations, small databases, images/PDFs, a mathematical formula editor, etc.

Open Source application that creates and edits PDF documents.

Free, open source tool for taking screenshots and editing and annotating them.

The longstanding favorite, full-featured, free and open source image editing application. Like Photoshop, the learning curve is steep, so check out the GIMP tutorials. https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

If you are used to Photoshop, this free and open source image editing application is built on the GIMP source code, but behaves like Photoshop.

Open Source application that creates and edits PDFs and also is a vector drawing and graphics tool. A better option for PDF editing if your document is image-heavy.

With Pressbooks, faculty can find, adapt, create, and contribute to educational content that is customizable, accessible, interactive, and, if the author chooses, free. Whether an institution requires a quick solution for the next semester or an educational content creation solution for the long term, Pressbooks can ease the burden of the rapid shift to blended and online learning.

Ubiquity Press is an open access publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and data. We operate a highly cost-efficient model that makes quality open access publishing affordable for everyone.

PubPub is a collaborative writing and publishing platform from MIT's Knowledge Futures group. The basic level for free allows for robust drafting, editing, and publishing features, as well as a URL at pubpub.org and e-mail support.

WeBWorK is an open-source online homework system for math and science courses. Instructors can create problem sets or use material from existing libraries. Current courses include college algebra, discrete mathematics, probability and statistics, single and multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra and complex analysis.

Can be used to create interactive tutorials and mash up text/media.

Easily record and edit videos of action on your computer screen.

Online photo editor and drawing tool. Requires Flash.

Build publication-quality books and documents from computational materials.

An online platform for collaborative authoring and reviewing open textbooks. Another editing, cloning, and publishing interface all in one.

A free image hosting service (up to one terabyte) that allows you to create galleries and slideshows and mark your content as Creative Commons.

Audio site. Especially useful because it allows users to record audio on their phones and upload transcripts.

Is the most popular and receives the most traffic, but the learner may get lost among millions and millions of search results.

For K-12. Contains content by and for educators.

Is comparable to YouTube, but a smaller user-base, less clutter from low-quality videos, and no advertisements.

Allows you to upload Word documents, which you can then embed in any blog, web page, or online course. Be mindful that 1. Scribd has shifted its focus to selling a monthly subscription to their ebook collection, and 2. many Scribd users use it to host junk and plagiarized content.

Allows you to upload Powerpoint presentations, which you can then embed in any blog, web page, or online course. You can mark your content as Creative Commons.

Allows you to upload Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint slideshows, which you can then link to - but not embed.

H5P makes it easy to create interactive content by providing a range of content types for various needs. You can create interactive content by adding the H5P plugin to your WordPress, Moodle or Drupal site, or integrate it via LTI with Canvas, Brightspace, Blackboard and many other VLEs that supports LTI integration.

Hypothesis is a powerful web annotation tool that many users deploy to enable collaboration between authors and editors, personal note taking and annotation, engagement with readers, or use as a teaching tool with students.

OPEN Washington, an Open Educational Resources (OER) network.

A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT™) is a document that explains how information and communication technology (ICT) products such as software, hardware, electronic content, and support documentation meet (conform to) the Revised 508 Standards for IT accessibility. VPATs™ help Federal agency contracting officials and government buyers to assess ICT for accessibility when doing market research and evaluating proposals.

Includes 80 online resources that you can use to learn how to build or participate in a collaborative educational effort that focuses on publication and development of those materials. Although some choices focus solely on publication, development, or tools used to accomplish either effort, some provide multifaceted venues that offer communities in which to collaborate on one or all of these efforts.

Create a lesson by adding questions, discussion topics, and other supplementary materials to TED Talks or any educational video on YouTube.

Open source, format-flexible web-based editing and production workflow tool.