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Heritage University OER (Open Access Resources): Social Work

New LibGuide for OER (Open Access Resources)

OER Logo

Major Repositories

                              Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) M*
“Real-time federated search for OER content.”—from the website

 

                              Merlot SystemM*
“Provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.”—from the website

 

                              OER Commons*
“The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education. This shift in educational practice is not just about cost savings and easy access to openly licensed content; it’s about participation and co-creation.”—from the website

Open Culture  
“Get free courses online from the world’s leading universities. You can download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player. For more online courses, visit our complete collection.”—from the website

PrePrints

Preprints
“Preprints is a platform dedicated to making early versions of research outputs permanently available and citable. We post original research articles and comprehensive reviews, and papers can be updated by authors at any time. Content on Preprints is not peer-reviewed and can receive feedback from readers.”—from the website.

Open Online Courses

                             
Class Central M*
Class Central is a search engine and reviews site for free online courses popularly known as MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses.”—from the website
 

                             Coursera M*
“Every course on Coursera is taught by top instructors from the world’s best universities and educational institutions. Courses include recorded video lectures, auto-graded and peer-reviewed assignments, and community discussion forums.”—from the website

                              edX*
“There are three commitments we've made to the world. We've been grounded by these since day one:

  • Increase access to high-quality education for everyone, everywhere
  • Enhance teaching and learning on campus and online
  • Advance teaching and learning through research.”—from the website


Ohio Open Ed Collaborative

Faculty teams representing Ohio's 2-year and 4-year colleges and universities, both public and private, put these guides together to present alternatives to commercial textbooks for Ohio students. Full course guides using OER materials are available for many of Ohio's high enrollment courses. They can be adopted in full or in part to meet the needs of course instructors. The courses have been divided into modules that meet the objectives of the Ohio Department of Higher Education's Transfer Assurance Guides (TAGs) and Ohio Transfer Module (OTM) guidelines.

OpenLearn -
“Welcome to OpenLearn - the home of free learning from The Open University. Are you looking for a new topic to explore, or want to dig deeper into something you've already discovered? Whether it’s a 60-second animated video or a 24-hour course you are after, you will find it on OpenLearn for free.”—from the website

Google Advanced Search and OER

Textbook Collections

                            Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
“DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.”—from the website
 

InTechOpen
 inTech Open believes “that scientific progress is generated by collaboration, that the playing field for scientific research should be leveled globally, and that research conducted in a democratic environment, with the use of innovative technologies, should be made available to anyone.”—from the website

                            National Academies Press (NAP)   
“The National Academies Press (NAP) publishes the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative, independently-researched information on important matters in science and health policy.”—from the website

                            OAPEN
“OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.”—from the website

Open Social Work
“Open textbooks are licensed under creative commons licenses or public domain. They are available for free to anyone (students, faculty, informal learners) in multiple digital and print formats at the links below.”—from the website

  Open Textbooks   
“Textbooks in the Open Textbook Library are considered open because they are free to use and distribute, and are licensed to be freely adapted or changed with proper attribution.”—from the website

 

                            Wikibooks M*
“Welcome to Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit.  3,204 books with 89,061 pages..”—from the website

Media

CK12--
CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing access to high quality educational materials for K-12 students all over the world. We offer free high-quality, standards-aligned, open content in the STEM subjects. By providing these free resources, CK-12 is working toward educational equity for all.

Creative Commons  
“CC Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. Creative Commons, the nonprofit behind CC Search, is the maker of the CC licenses, used over 1.4 billion times to help creators share knowledge and creativity online.”—from the website
Grand Challenges for Social Work

The Grand Challenges for Social Work was established by the American Academy of Social Welfare and Social Work (AASWSW) in 2016. The Facebook Group is here to share news, invite dialogue and foster collaboration around 12 pressing social issues, known as Grand Challenges.

Social Work Podcast
Provides information on all things social work, including direct practice (both clinical and community organizing), research, policy, education... and everything in between.

                            TED Talks* 
 “TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages.”—from the website
Toolkit for Teaching Communication Skills in Social Work

This toolkit includes five videos demonstrating basic communication skills and a teaching guide for instructors. The videos are a series of short vignettes of counselling sessions between a social worker and a client. Four of the videos target one or two basic communication skills so students can learn the skills in manageable segments. The fifth video demonstrates how a counsellor would amalgamate all the skills in a counselling session. The teaching guide provides transcripts, discussion questions and exercises/role plays that instructors can use in both face-to-face and online teaching to enhance student learning of communication skills.

University Videos
This new Digital Library portal contains the metadata of the YouTube Channels of the world's Top Universities.  Viewing University Videos within the Digital Library provides viewer-enhancements that will make these videos attract and keep more viewers.  User Benefits: there are four main user-enhancement features to watch for:

  1. Video transcript plays in sync with the playing video, enhancing the user experience
  2. Video Search - enhanced and advanced search capabilities, plus hit to hit navigation
  3. Video Clip and Share - instant and automatic sharing of important video clips
  4. Video Transcript Navigation, allowing viewers to jump to any spot in the video

Wikimedia Commons (images, videos, and sounds)
“A media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. Use the search to find content related to your interest.”—from the website

Open Access Communities

Open Social Work
A collaborative project that addresses open education, open access, open science, and the practices that support them.  We are inspired to support the human rights to free access to knowledge and equitable access to education.

Political Social Worker

The Political Social Worker was founded in 2012 as a Tumblr blog. In 2013 the blog became self-hosted. My goal was to create a blog focused on macro social work because there was a lack information about community practice on the web. The blog serves as a platform for me to share information related to macro practice, politics, and to showcase my work as a consultant. Today The Political Social Worker receives more than 3,000 unique visitors a month.

Research Gate
"ResearchGate allows you to network with the largest global community dedicated to science and research: we help you to expand your contacts, share knowledge and find potential research partners.”—from the website

Databases

                              
BioMed Central
“BMC has an evolving portfolio of some 300 peer-reviewed journals, sharing discoveries from research communities in science, technology, engineering and medicine. In 1999 we made high quality research open to everyone who needed to access it – and in making the open access model sustainable, we changed the world of academic publishing.”—from the website

                            DOAJ*

“The DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. Today, this independent database contains over 15 000 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. Open access journals from all countries and in all languages are welcome to apply for inclusion.”—from the website

FreeFullPDF
“The aim of FreeFullPDF.com is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific journals, theses, posters and patents. All scientific subjects are covered and all content are freely available in PDF format. FreeFullPDF.com was developed by KnowMade SARL. KnowMade is a Technology Intelligence company specialized in the research and analysis of scientific and technical information. We provide customized watching services and on demand studies with high added value to businesses and research laboratories.”—from the website


The Georgia Knowledge Repository
*
“The Georgia Knowledge Repository, an initiative of GALILEO, is a digital archive that includes the academic and intellectual works of Georgia’s colleges and universities. Its purpose is to highlight the scholarship of the participating institutions while also making it available to the citizens of Georgia and the scholarly community at large. Digital collections from the University of Georgia.”—from the website

JURN
“Search millions of free academic articles, chapters and theses.”—from the website


                               PubMed Central*
“Understanding nature's mute but elegant language of living cells is the quest of modern molecular biology. From an alphabet of only four letters representing the chemical subunits of DNA emerges a syntax of life processes whose most complex expression is man (sic).”—from the website

Courseware

                              Khan Academy*
“Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. We tackle math, science, computing, history, art history, economics, and more, including K-14 and test preparation (SAT, Praxis, LSAT) content. We focus on skill mastery to help learners establish strong foundations, so there's no limit to what they can learn next.”—from the website

 

                            Library of Congress
 
“The Library of Congress offers classroom materials and professional development to help teachers effectively use primary sources from the Library's vast digital collections in their teaching.”—from the website

                             
 LibreTexts 
M*

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) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.


 

                              OASIS* 
“Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 117 different sources and contains 388,707 records. .”—from the website

KEY:

M--Meta= a service which includes resources compiled from other sites and a serves as a directory to them.

*= a site of some note and merit which has found favor in the Library Dude’s eyes, for better or worse…