Where to find Open Educational Resources:

Below is a list and some tips for finding openly licensed authentic resources (e.g., culturally relevant photographs and target language music), as well as openly licensed teacher-authored pedagogical resources (e.g., lessons, syllabi, and curricula).

Don't forget to also look at COERLL's own materials, if you haven't already!

KEEP IN MIND:

If you are serious about making as much of your curriculum open as possible, this OER development worksheet developed by Lisa Young at Scottsdale Community College can help you to map out what you need. (The worksheet is licensed under a CC BY license.)
Be flexible... even if you don't find the specific thing you are looking for, you may stumble upon a resource and find a way to build a lesson around it (rather than building a lesson and then finding the resource to plug in).
Some of the below sites have a combination of copyright and Creative Commons materials, so be sure to pay attention to the licenses.

OER Repositories

These repositories contain educator-authored resources such as lesson plans, curricula, and syllabi.

MERLOT World Languages Portal
OER Commons
Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota)
Languages Open Resources Online (LORO):
Language Resource Centers (LRCs)

Learn more about other repositories, and the availability of foreign language materials, in this COERLL blog post.

Or, watch this webinar recording, featuring Anita Young & Pat Mulroy (World of Learning Institute at Appalachia Intermediate Unit 8), Mindy Bowland (Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education), Kevin Hawkins (University of North Texas): COERLL OER Hangout April 2020: Searching and Publishing in OER Repositories (01:00:24)

Media Repositories

These repositories contain openly licensed images, audio, video, and text that you can use as authentic resources. Don't forget to try searching in both English and your target language to get a variety of results!

Images (Click to see list)

Audio (Click to see list)

Video (Click to see list)

Text (Click to see list)

Multimedia (Click to see list)

Search platforms (Click to see list)

▹▹▹ Read more about making your own videos on page: Producing Videos for Language Learning

Tips for searching

View COERLL's webinar on finding authentic texts, featuring Christian Hilchey, Chantelle Warner, and Gabriela Zapata (October 2019)

Vetting what you find

The UT Austin OER LibGuide has useful guidelines for evaluating the OER you find, based on the content, accessibility, licensing, quality, and format. It links to rubrics from Achieve.org and RCampus.

Check Your Knowledge

Choose one of the repositories or search platforms you haven’t used and do a search for something you could use in your materials. Which platform did you choose? What worked well or badly in the search?

Go to the next page to learn how to attribute the open content you use.