There are so many places for organizing OERs and tools for searching, yet finding them remains a challenge. Here is a powerful one developed at George Mason University, the Mason OER Metafinder a “Real-time federated search for OER content”
Before jumping in to search, it’s worth reading the description of the service by GMU librarian Wally Grotophorst.
Unlike other OER discovery sites (e.g, OER Commons, OASIS, MERLOT, OpenStax, etc.) with our Metafinder you aren’t searching a static database that we’ve built. Instead, the OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button… A distinct feature of the Mason OER Metafinder is the scope of our discovery service. We’re searching well-known OER repositories like OpenStax, OER Commons, MERLOT but also sites like HathiTrust, DPLA, Internet Archive and NYPL Digital Collections where valuable but often overlooked (and often “open”) educational materials may be found.
The search interface offers many ways to structure the search, including limiting the scope to more relevant sources.
A very general search, like the ones I tried, flood you with perhaps too many results. One of the useful features is being able to create a pre-selected set of relevant sources, such as the one for GMU research scientists. Plus, you can add MOM to your own web sites with a search widget.
And even more interesting, under the list of 450+ institutions using MOM, you can find links to where OER work is happening from Adams State University to Youngstown State University
You can find a video tutorial for using MOM at the Hartford University OER site created by librarian Jillian Maynard along with other open licensed videos for using OpenStax, the Open Textbook Library, and Oasis (from SUNY Geneseo).
How do you go about finding OERs? What kind of success can you share with using any of these (or others). What are other ways (better than MOM?!) that might help you better find OERs?