Sociology

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are high-quality, openly licensed, online educational materials that offer an extraordinary opportunity for people everywhere to share, use, and reuse knowledge. They also demonstrate great potential as a mechanism for instructional innovation as networks of teachers and learners share best practices." - The Hewlett Foundation

According to the Open Education Handbook OER need to meet the "5Rs Framework." This framework outlines that resources are free, and that users have the legal right to: 

• Retain- Make, own, and control copies of content
• Reuse- Use unaltered content in a wide range of ways (posting to Blackboard, distributing in class, emailing to colleagues and students, etc.)
• Revise- Adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself 
• Remix- The original or revised content can be combined with other open content to create something new 
• Redistribute- Original content, your revisions, or your remixes can be shared with others 

OERs are not just textbooks, other common resources include:

• Learning modules
• Syllabi
• Learning objects
• Course websites
• Lectures and presentations
• Course materials
• Activities, labs, assignments
• Software
• Videos

OER are free and legal to reuse, improve, adapt, and share:

• Save time by customizing existing educational resources to fit your course content
• Find new opportunities to include interdisciplinary teaching and learning by integrating multiple resources

Redefine the "traditional" classroom:

• Introduce multi-media and interactive sources to provide students with a variety of engaging learning tools
• Go beyond the confines of the teaching from the textbook
• Reduce educational material costs for students

• MIT Courseware- Sociology

  Use the course finder to browse the 2 sociology specialties: community development, and social justice. Use the limiters to select the types of OER you would like to use including: lecture notes, interactive simulations, online textbooks, and assessments.
• OER Commons- Sociology

  The OER Commons is a single search source that pulls materials from multiple OER collections. Use the left-side menu to refine your sociology resources search by education level, material type, media format, and conditions of use.
• The Society Pages

  Browse podcasts, articles, and blogs, and user generated community content related to crime, culture, gender, health, inequality, politics, and race.
  "The Society Pages (TSP) is an open-access social science project headquartered in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota and supported by individual donors and publishing partner W.W. Norton & Company, Inc."
• Sociological Cinema

  The Sociological Cinema is an online resource to help sociology instructors incorporate videos into their classes. The centerpiece of the site is a searchable database of video clips. Each clip is tagged with sociological themes, year, and includes a summary of the clip with suggestions of how to use it in the classroom. The focus of the site is on short video clips (<10 minutes), but videos may be up to one hour in length. The site also includes comment sections for all videos, a blog, assignments, video-related scholarship on teaching and learning, and a form to submit new video clips to the site. -Merlot
• University of Oxford- Sociology Podcasts

  Over 50 podcasts created by University of Oxford faculty, visiting lecturers, and conference addresses available on various topics.

• BC Open Textbook

  The textbook section of the BC Campus OpenEd project. Textbooks created for the top 40 highest enrolled first and second year subject areas.
• College Open Textbooks

  Created by a collaboration between educational non-profit and for-profit organizations from over 200 colleges.
• InTech

  One of the largest open access publishers and distributors of books in the science, technology, and medical fields.
• MIT OpenCourseWare- Online Textbooks

  Textbooks created for MIT OpenCourseWare classes, that open-licensed electronic versions of print books, self-published online books, or thorough course notes. Primarily for the science and engineering disciplines.
• OAPEN Library

  The Open Access Publishing in European Networks provides access to free, peer-reviewed academic textbooks produced for the humanities and social sciences. Not all books are available in English.
• Open Course Library (Washington Community and Technical Colleges)

  Offers collections of course materials that cost $30 or less for 81 highest enrolled courses. Offers powerpoints, assignments, lectures and more.
• OpenStax College

  Created by Rice University, these peer-reviewed text books are written by professional content developers to meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses.
• Open SUNY Textbooks

  Established by the State University of New York, this open access initiative publishes high-quality resources and engages faculty as authors and peer-reviewers.
• Open Textbook Library

  Created by the University of Minnesota, these faculty-reviewed textbooks cover a wide range of academic subjects.
• Saylor Academy Open Textbooks

  This non-profit organization sponsored by the Saylor Foundation, is focused on bringing "freely available education to all." This collection of open textbooks supports the Saylor online courses. It's a collection of open course materials for high-enrollment college courses.
• Textbook Equity

  Creator, publisher, and distributor of academically reviewed and classroom tested college-level textbooks. Many contain learning exercises, discussion questions, and other supplemental materials