Skip to Main Content

Open Educational Resources: CHEMISTRY

How to find, adopt, adapt, and create open educational resources.

OERs

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

This guide includes collections of OERs and other freely available online educational resources. Quality, accessibility, and copyright of the materials may vary.

The purpose of these discipline specific pages is to suggest content that might be of interest to faculty who are considering adopting open educational resources for their classes. This list of content is not exhaustive. We encourage any comments about the content featured on this page or recommendations of additional content. [Contact us at: gr-faculty_support@wpi.edu ]

Try the California State University: Course Materials Finder Tool - Enter a book's ISBN to search for freely available related materials related to the book.

Featured Resources: Chemistry OER

Finding OERs by Discipline

Chemistry

Open Textbooks

BC Open Collection Textbooks: Chemistry – a curated selection of open educational resources (OER) that can be accessed by educators in B.C. and beyond to use in the classroom,
or in an institutional learning management system

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB): Chemistry - a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited collections published under an open access license

ecampusOntario Textbooks: Chemistry – from Ontario’s collection of open textbooks

GALILEO Open Learning Materials (Textbooks): Chemistry – open textbook and reference resources from the University System of Georgia

InTechOpen: Chemistry – “leading publisher of Open Access books, specialising in technology, science and medicine”; peer reviewed open access books

LibreTexts Chemistry – “Open Access textbook environment is under constant revision by students, faculty, and outside experts to supplant conventional paper-based books”

MERLOT Textbooks: Chemistry - a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed
and used by an international education community

MSU Libraries OER Textbooks: Chemistry – a collection of open textbooks from Michigan State

The National Academies Press (NAP): Chemistry - titles in PDF format, and almost all of these PDFs can be downloaded for free by the chapter or the entire book

OAPEN: Chemistry - a collection of open access publications and also a publishing platform

OASIS-Textbooks: Chemistry – a curated collection of open textbooks from 115 different sources

OER Commons: Chemistry – a curated collection of open textbooks

Open Oregon Educational Resources: Chemistry – “promotes textbook affordability for community college and university students, and facilitates widespread adoption of open,
low-cost, high-quality materials”

OpenStax CNX - Chemistry - Peer-reviewed. Openly licensed. 100% free textbooks

Open Textbook Library - a selection of chemistry open textbooks from the University of Minnesota

Pressbook Directory: Chemistry – an index of books published across 152 Pressbooks networks

Western Oregon University: Chemistry Textbooks – “the WOU Chemistry Department is investing effort in the development and
use of Open Education Resources for Chemistry Coursework”

Open Courseware

Chemistry (Lumen Learning) – from SUNY, presents the core concepts of chemistry and understand how those concepts apply to their lives and the world around them,
meeting the scope and sequence of most general chemistry courses

Course Hero: Boundless Chemistry - courseware includes resources copyrighted and openly licensed by third parties under a Creative Commons license;
Faculty contribute resources such as assignments, quizzes, case studies, lecture notes, and more to the site

ecampusOntario: Chemistry – assessments, interactive activities, learning resources, instructional objects and more from Ontario’s ecampus repository

GALILEO Open Learning Materials: Chemistry – open courses and ancillary teaching materials from the University System of Georgia

MERLOT Course materials: Chemistry – a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed
and used by an international education community

MIT Open Courseware Chemistry - courses, materials & teaching resources from MIT

Open Course Library: Chemistry – course materials from the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges; “free to download, edit, & use”

Open Learning Initiative: Biochemistry - an introductory course from Carnegie Mellon, designed for both biology and chemical engineering majors;
includes a molecular simulation to explore the effect of molecular interactions on the biochemical properties of systems

Open Michigan: Chemistry - OER course materials from the University of Michigan

OpenYale Course: Chemistry - introductory courses focused on current theories of structure and mechanism in organic chemistry, their historical development,
and their basis in experimental observation

Saylor Academy: Chemistry -PDF and HTML versions of textbook; content authored by Saylor Academy is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Teaching Commons: Chemistry – “curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open-access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans,
multimedia, lectures, k-12 materials, and more”

General Chemistry-related OERs

Applied Math & Science Education Repository - Chemistry -a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community
and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use; part of the National Science Digital Library

LibreTexts Chemistry – “Open Access textbook environment is under constant revision by students, faculty, and outside experts to supplant conventional paper-based books”

MERLOT Chemistry Portal - many resources available for teaching and learning chemistry

OASIS: Chemistry – OER textbooks, learning materials and objects, courses, activities and more

OER Commons: Chemistry – a curated collection that includes curricular materials, textbooks, simulations, games, assessments and more

Pressbooks OER by Discipline Directory: Chemistry- curated collection of links to textbooks, videos, course materials, and more

Teaching Commons: Chemistry – “curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open-access textbooks,
course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, lectures, k-12 materials, and more”

Lab manuals, Interactive materials & simulations
*many of the simulations,labs, and videos are view/use only (i.e. not adaptable)

ChemCollective - a collection of virtual labs, scenario-based learning activities, tutorials, and concept tests from Carnegie Mellon; funded by the National Science Foundation;
“Our software is available free of charge to all educators and students under the creative commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND)”

Chem Spider - a free chemical structure database providing fast text and structure search access to over 63 million structures from hundreds of data sources

Chem Tool Box - contains numerous scientific data

Chemical Education Xchange (ChemEd X) - learning resources and forums for discussion and collaboration on an interactive platform

Chemistry 1 Lab Manual (Lumen Learning) – from SUNY, accompanies college Chemistry courses and is used to support and assess knowledge acquired in the classroom
setting to be applied in the real world

Chemix - an online editor for drawing science lab diagrams and experiment apparatus

ChemReaX - chemical reaction modeling and simulation app from ScienceBySimulation

ChemSims - simulations from the National Science Foundation covering solubility, kinetics, atomic interactions, gas laws, equilibrium, acid base, photoelectric effect,
and atomic emissions

ChemTube3D - contains interactive 3D animations and structures

Digital Lab Techniques Manual (MIT) - a series of videos designed to help users prepare for chemistry laboratory class

goREACT (Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago)- drag-and-drop laboratory, combine elements from the Periodic Table to
create chemical reactions

Interactive Periodic Table - The Royal Society of Chemistry's interactive periodic table features history, alchemy, podcasts, videos,
and data trends

Molecular Workbench - visual, interactive simulations for teaching & learning science;

NC State Undergraduate Organic Chemistry Teaching Laboratories - S.M.A.R.T. Lab Videos – student-created videos
for undergraduate organic chemistry courses, including lab techniques

NIST Chemistry Webbook - provides access to data compiled and distributed by NIST under the Standard Reference Data Program

Open Chemistry (OpenChem) Lecture Videos -a full curriculum of recorded lectures covering undergraduate chemistry plus selected graduate topics from UCI Irvine

OpenOChem – A freely available online homework system that allows users to create interactive questions, and then assemble them into activities
such as sequential and adaptive quizzes
and SlideDecks; uses LTI, so that students and faculty members access it through their home institutions learning management systems (e.g., Moodle and Canvas)

OrgChem 101 Learning Lab - a set of organic chemistry learning modules to explore organic chemistry concepts; from the University of Ontario; (CC BY-NC-SA)

PhET Interactive Simulations:Chemistry - from the University of Colorado, open source simulations

University of Oxford Podcasts: Chemistry - educational podcasts from the University of Oxford

VR Molecules Pro - an interactive simulation illustrating molecule vibration and rotation modes for twenty-four different molecules.
licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 2.5 Canada License

Web Spectra -Spectroscopy Problem Solving - this site provides 1H NMR and 13C NMR, DEPT, COSY and IR spectra of various compounds to interpret

Wolfram Demonstrations Project: General Chemistry - License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0; a collection of interactive visualizations