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Open Educational Resources: PHYSICS

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.

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: Physics OER

Finding OERs by Discipline

Open Textbooks

BCcampus OpenEd:Physics

  • openly licensed physics textbooks created or revised by faculty from British Columbia's post-secondary institutions

Bookboon.com: Physics

  • free eBooks and textbooks that can be downloaded as a pdf, no registration needed

DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books): Physics

  • indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers

InTech: Physics

  • open access physics books; “Read, share and download more than 6,300 peer-reviewed Open Access books”

LibreTexts Physics Library

  • courses, textbooks, homework exercises and ancillary materials; “an Open Access textbook environment is under constant revision by students, faculty, and outside experts to supplant conventional paper-based books”

MERLOT Open Access Textbooks: Physics

  • online textbooks offered by its author(s) with Creative Commons, public domain, or other public use license agreement 

Milne Open Textbooks: Physics

  • from Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff

MIT Open Courseware (Textbooks): Physics

  • online, open textbooks from MIT

National Academies Press: Physics

  • “almost all of these PDFs can be downloaded for free by the chapter or the entire book.”

OAPEN: Physics

  • “OAPEN Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation based in the Netherlands, OAPEN is dedicated to open access, peer-reviewed books”

OER Commons: Physics

  • a curated collection of physics resources and textbooks

Open Culture: Physics

  • “free textbooks (aka open textbooks) written by knowledgeable scholars”; listed by subject: Scroll down for physics

Open Stax Textbooks :Physics

  • published by Rice University's OpenStax,; Peer-reviewed, Openly licensed, 100% free

Open Textbook Library: Physics

  • faculty reviewed textbook listing from the University of Minnesota; the textbooks have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed

PressBooks Directory: Physics

  • “clone, revise, remix, and redistribute all of the openly licensed content found through this Directory”

 

Open Courseware

Open Courseware

Affordable Learning Georgia: Physics and Astronomy Ancillary Materials

  • ancillary course materials such as problem sets, video lectures, & more

Boundless Physics

  • courseware includes resources copyrighted and openly licensed by third parties under a Creative Commons license

City Tech Open Lab: Physics

  • courses and materials in an open-source, digital platform designed to support teaching and learning at City Tech (New York City College of Technology)

ComPADRE Community Resources (American Association of Physics Teachers)

  • ComPADRE (Communities for Physics and Astronomy Digital Resources in Education) is “a network of well-organized, digital collections of high-quality educational materials in physics and astronomy”; includes curricular materials, digital libraries, and online journals

Cool4Ed Course Materials Showcase: Physics

  • course content and learning objectives shared by the California Community Colleges, the California State University, and the University of California; includes open eTextbooks 

MERLOT Materials: Physics

  • course materials, textbooks, tutorials, simulations, activities, assessments & more

MIT Open Courseware: Physics

  • open online courses with video lectures, exercises, quizzes and more

Ohio Open Ed: Physics

  • curated collection of course materials used by OhioLink schools

OpenCourse Library: Physics

  • “a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts”

Open Michigan: Physics

  • course materials for General Physics 1

Open Yale Courses: Physics

  • includes Fundamental of Physics I and II; Open Yale Courses (OYC) provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge 

The Physics Classroom

  • “numerous tools to address both in-the-classroom and at-home needs of students, teachers, and "classrooms"; includes videos, simulations, concept builders, calculator pad and more

PhysPort

  • "PhysPort supports physics faculty in implementing research-based teaching practices in their classrooms, by providing expert recommendations about teaching methods, assessment, and results from physics education research (PER)"

PressBooks: OER by Discipline Directory: Physics

  • courseware, textbooks, simulations and more

Saylor Academy: Physics

  • collection of PDF & html versions of textbooks plus syllabi, quizzes & more; the content authored by Saylor Academy is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

General Physics-related OER

General Physics-related OER

Applied Math & Science Education Repository: Physics

  • AMSER (the Applied Math and Science Education Repository) is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges 

B.C. Open Collection: Physics

  • openly licensed books and course materials created or revised by faculty from British Columbia's post-secondary institutions

E-books Directory: Physics

  • “a free web resource which contains links to freely downloadable e-books, technical papers, documents, as well as user contributed content”

MERLOT Physics Community Portal

  • a collection of educational resources for instructors and students of physics; open access and open source content 

National Science Digital Library: Physics

  • educational resources for teaching and learning in the STEM field

OASIS: Physics

  • “Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier”; searches open content from 115 different sources

OER Commons: Physics

  • a curated collection of books, courseware, activities, assessments and more from a public digital library of open educational resources

Project Gutenberg: Physics

  • an online library of free eBooks

Lab manuals, Interactive materials & simulations

Lab manuals, Interactive materials & simulations

             *many of the simulations and videos are view/use only (i.e. not adaptable)

3JCN (3D) Physics Simulation

  • over 330 interactive 3D simulations across a wide range of physics topics including mechanics, electromagnetism, waves, optics, and modern physics. These simulations are designed to enhance conceptual understanding through visual and interactive engagement.

CCP (Connected Curriculum Project): Physics Applications

  • interactive learning materials for mathematics and its applications

College Physics Answers

  • expert solutions on video to physics homework problems from the OpenStax College Physics textbooks

HippoCampus: Physics

  • a variety of multimedia content online, including videos, animations, and simulations

HTML5 Simulations (Boston University)

  • from the Physics Dept. at BU, simulations to manipulate systems and experiment with climate change, motion, forces, gravity, momentum, energy, and rotation

Interactive Physics Demos

  • developed by the United States Military Academy for their University Physics course; each activity is presented as a worksheet, which guides through an experimental or observational process

Molecular Workbench

  • visual, interactive simulations for teaching & learning science; free and open source

nanoHUB.org

  • "our site hosts a rapidly growing collection of Simulation Programs for nanoscale phenomena that run in the cloud and are accessible through a web browser"; site also offers online presentations; course materials; learning modules; and podcasts

oPhysics

  • a collection of interactive physics simulations, created using GeoGebra software

Open Source Physics

  • “provides curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling. Computational physics and computer modeling provide students with new ways to understand, describe, explain, and predict physical phenomena.”

Pedagogy in Action: Interactive Teaching Demonstrations: Physics

  • examples of teaching with demonstrations from National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and sponsored by the National Science Foundation

PhET Interactive Simulations: Physics

  • “PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations”; intuitive, game-like environments

Physics Classroom

  • physics tutorials that cover all topics typically covered in college level Physics I and Physics II courses

Physics Simulations

  • interactive physics simulations from myPhysicsLab and provided as open source software under the Apache 2.0 License.Source code is available at https://github.com/myphysicslab/myphysicslab

Physlet Physics 3E:Interactive Illustrations, Explorations, and Problems

  • for Introductory Physics - resources and material is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

PSRC (Physical Science Resource Center)

  • a source for physics educational resources provided by the American Association of Physics Teachers; includes curriculum materials, classroom demonstrations, labs, online learning materials, evaluation instruments, and more

University of Oxford Podcasts: Physics

  • educational podcasts from the University of Oxford

Wolfram Alpha Physics Examples

  • explore data about phenomena in the areas of quantum mechanics, nuclear and particle physics, thermodynamics and Newtonian mechanics

Wolfram Demonstrations Project: Physics

  • open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, & more