An Open Educational Resource is any open-licensed material that can be used for educational purposes. If the licensing is open, then the materials are usually free or of very low cost. Additionally, OERs are often open-source, and through their licensing, permit others to modify the content. Large examples of OERs for math include free textbooks and e-books, GeoGebra, and WeBWorK. A smaller example might be a worksheet designed by an instructor that has been openly licensed, or a web site with a free educational applet.

General OER information

• The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
• PCC's OER web site
• A web comic touching on the issue

OER Math Textbooks

OpenStax (https://openstaxcollege.org/books) is a nonprofit organization associated with Rice University. They have several vetted OER math textbooks in their collection (which is growing).

A list of open textbooks in math: http://collegeopentextbooks.org/opentextbookcontent/open-textbooks-by-subject/math. A cursory examination reveals some of the items listed here are incomplete. However the list is extensive, and includes many items worth looking into. If you are serving on a textbook selection committee, please visit this list and investigate relevant books. Keep in mind that while publishers have book reps to bring options to your attention, there are no salespeople for these options.

Another source of OER courses is the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon. There looks to be a small number of math courses here.

These are items from the links above that have raised eyebrows and passed a cursory examination.

• MTH 243/4: https://oli.cmu.edu/jcourse/webui/guest/join.do?section=probstat (this one is from the OLI)
• MTH 111: http://www.opentextbookstore.com/precalc/
• MTH 20: https://sccmath.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/082_final_wkbook__2nded.pdf
• MTH 20: Another OLI course. Based on other courses at OLI, this could be a good one. It appears to be still under construction. The course claims to have a CG unit followed by the math topics that we put into MTH 20, but when I go into the course I can only see the CG unit. Hopefully they are working on it so I will leave this here.

If an item from the list at collegeopentextbooks.org is not listed here, it probably just hasn't been assessed yet. If you find more candidates among that list, please add them here.

MathBook XML

See MathBook XML for information.

MTH 261 (Linear Algebra)

See MTH 261 project for details.

Math OERs in use at PCC

If you are using an OER that you would like to share here (either something you have found or something you have made), please add it to the table or contact Alex Jordan to add it.