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Open Educational Resources

A "getting started" guide overviewing open, editable, and lower-cost textbooks and open teaching & learning resources for faculty, students, and librarians.

Biological Sciences

Open Textbooks

Concepts of Biology is designed for the introductory biology course for nonmajors taught at most two- and four-year colleges. The scope, sequence, and level of the program are designed to match typical course syllabi in the market. Concepts of Biology includes interesting applications, features a rich art program, and conveys the major themes of biology.     Biology is grounded in an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. The book also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.     Designed to support a course in microbiology, this laboratory experience permits a glimpse into the microscopic world and engages student interest in microbiology as a topic, field of study, and career. Microbiology: A Laboratory Experience provides a series of laboratory exercises suitable for a one-semester undergraduate microbiology or bacteriology course with a three- or four-hour lab period that meets once or twice a week. This lab manual conforms to the American Society for Microbiology curriculum guidelines and takes a ground-up approach.

Additional Sources of Open Textbooks

NLM / NCBI Bookshelf (National Library of Medicine / National Center for Biotechnology Information) "provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare." To use these materials, see the Copyright information.

Additional Course materials

Encyclopedia of Life  "Our knowledge of the many life-forms on Earth - of animals, plants, fungi, protists and bacteria - is scattered around the world in books, journals, databases, websites, specimen collections, and in the minds of people everywhere. Imagine what it would mean if this information could be gathered together and made available to everyone – anywhere – at a moment’s notice."  -EOL

The Cell: An Image Library, from the American Society for Cell Biology.http://www.cellimagelibrary.org/home This impressive open-access resource sponsored by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) boasts nearly 9,000 multimedia files. ASCB states that the site is primarily a research tool, but also an educational resource. It is browsable by cell process, cell component, cell type, and organism. A free "Cell Library" app for iPhone and iPad is available through the AppStore. User accounts allow for the creation of folders and storing of image records. The site's Pivot View section provides an image gallery view that can be filtered by cell type, cell line, organism, image type, author, and license.

Virtual Histology Lab -University of Oklahoma The Virtual Histology Lab features an introduction to using microscopes, an introduction to histological staining and cell structure.  Furthermore, it is a collection of images of tissue specimens intended to accompany a histology class.  The contents of this site are under the full copyright of their creator.

MIT Life Sciences Course. Pursuing an education in Life Sciences is both exciting and challenging, and we hope you experience both in viewing this collation!"  To re-use these materials, follow the CC BY NC SA permissions.

"PhET provides fun, free, interactive, research-based science and mathematics simulations. We extensively test and evaluate each simulation to ensure educational effectiveness."  To re-use these materials, follow the CC BY 3.0 permissions.

Science Forward "videos have been produced by Science Forward to support inquiry-based basic science classes.  Students, we expect, will watch the videos and come to class with a wider range of basic questions, primed for discussion." To re-use these materials, follow the CC BY NC SA 4.0 permissions.