Open Education Resource Finder
Open Educational Resources (OER) are online materials freely available for use by any learner or teacher. Every adoption of OER materials saves students money whether they are used to complement or substitute for fee-based materials. Tools facilitate faculty searches through a wealth of available OER content, including repositories at MERLOT, Connexions, NSDL, and the Open Courseware Consortium.
The Digital Marketplace has developed a variety of simple search tools (OER Finders) where you supply the ISBN or the subject matter of your current textbook and the Digital Marketplace tools provide you a list of:
- Free online course modules to build or enhance your curriculum
- Free online open textbooks
- Free online complete courses published by US universities such as MIT
- Free online accessible textbooks
The OER Finders are deployed as part of the CSU’s Affordable Learning Solutions Initiative (http://als.csuprojects.org 
) which organizes the tools to easily discover the no-cost and low-cost options for instructional materials.
The Digital Marketplace continues to build more discovery tools, to help you search publisher textbooks and resources, library materials and free online courses materials all at the same time – reducing your time and workload in finding the best materials for your teaching and your students’ learning. Available tools can be found at: http://als.csuprojects.org/course_content .
2009 CSU