Free Resources: Saylor Foundation Opens Thousands of Learning Tools to Schools
The Saylor Foundation has opened its Media Library to the public, providing thousands of open educational resources, videos, articles, and full-length textbooks.
The Saylor Foundation is dedicated to providing free and open education, with complete courses offered t the K-12 and post-secondary levels. It provides a total of about 300 academic courses, along with workplace skills courses.
Its online Media Library, built on the open source DSpace repository platform, provides a growing list of about 6,000 total resources, including 3,000 open educational resources, 1,300 videos, 124 full-length textbooks, and 2,500 articles. Resources cover the arts, sciences, humanities, social sciences, engineering, business, and test prep. Materials include primary texts (such as Beowulf and Hamlet), references (such as the Catholic Encyclopedia), textbooks (such as The Electronic Introduction to Old English), maps, presentations, audio recordings, assessments, assignments, data sets, and others.
Said Thomas Bryan, Saylor Foundation's content management coordinator: "Our Media Library today accomplishes much more than what we had first expected it to do. You might be looking for at least one resource to use while writing a paper, creating a lesson plan, or for better understanding a topic from a class, and 10 or 20 related items will appear. With everything categorized by license type, the user knows exactly what they can do with the resource and how they can adapt it to fit their needs without the hassle of figuring it out on their own."
Saylor's Media Library is open now. It can be accessed at library.saylor.org.