Open Educational Resources (OER) for Public Health

Many instructors have a goal of moving to less costly and even free educational resources for their students, including open source textbooks, online simulations, videos, etc. These Open Educational Resources (OER) are remarkably diverse and range from effective and valuable to nascent and sometimes of poor quality. One of the primary barriers for instructors is simply finding these resources. Here, we’ve assembled a growing list of resources that we hope will be of value to our instructors. Inclusion on this list of Open Educational Resources does not indicate endorsement by SPH of a particular resource; each instructor should assess the value of these resources in light of their teaching needs. 

Please submit OER that you find that can be added to this site (email sroth1@umd.edu). Below, the OER are tentatively categorized within “themes” and where a resource crosses themes, an attempt has been made to post it in multiple themes. Those that don’t easily fall within a theme are in the General Public Health list.

General OER Resources

  • Open Educational Resources at UMD  - a central site for UMD OER resources and related information: http://oer.umd.edu/
  • Open Educational Resources (Library Guide) - a range of searchable OER sources: http://lib.guides.umd.edu/c.php?g=327271&p=2195735
  • MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT provides collections of peer reviewed online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services. Most, but not all, Merlot resources are Creative Commons licensed.
  • OER Commons - OER Commons helps educators, students, and lifelong learners avoid time-consuming searches and find exactly the right materials. With a single point of access from which they can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons’ growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER everyone can more efficiently find what they need: https://www.oercommons.org/
  • YouTube - The best way to find a video that is licensed under the Creative Commons license on YouTube is to use the CC Search tool described above in the General Search and Photo/Image Search sections. In addition if you are the YouTube home page http://youtube.com and type in your search term followed by a comma and then “creativecommons” the videos returned are CC licensed: http://YouTube.com
  • TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. On TED.com, the best talks and performances from TED and partners are made available to the world, for free. More than 900 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week.

 

General Public Health 

 

Behavioral and Community Health

Environmental Health

Epidemiology & Biostatistics

Family Science

Resource list in development

Health Services Administration

Johns Hopkins Approaches to Managing Health Services Organizations course - course materials available: http://ocw.jhsph.edu/index.cfm/go/viewCourse/course/AMHSO/coursePage/index/

Kinesiology