Research Guides: Modern Languages & Literatures: Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. Please check the LibGuide for OER to have more information.

TED Ed in Modern Languages

TED-Ed is TED’s youth and education initiative. TED-Ed’s mission is to spark and celebrate the ideas of teachers and students around the world.

Open Textbook Collections

World Languages Community Portal - MERLOT
An educational resource for teaching and learning languages. Free materials for for many different languages.
OER Commons
OER Commons provides a curated collection of textbooks and resources for world language studies.
Project Gutenberg - Chinese
Project Gutenberg's list of Chinese books in the public domain that are available freely online.
Project Gutenberg - French
Project Gutenberg's list of French books in the public domain that are available freely online.
Project Gutenberg - Spanish
Project Gutenberg's list of Spanish books in the public domain that are available freely online.

Open Resource Links

American English Dialect Recordings: The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection
The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection contains 118 hours of recordings documenting North American English dialects. The recordings include speech samples, linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations, and excerpts from public speeches.
BBC Languages
Lessons, phrases, vocabulary, tests, and links to news sources in 40 languages. Site is no longer updated, but most resources are still very useful.
Bilingual Contextual Dictionary - TREX
Tr-ex.me is bilingual contextual dictionary, containing translations of various phrases. For each translation, we have examples of using in various sentences. The examples are taken from millions of texts previously translated ranging from dialogues(subtitles of film), and official documents to multilingual websites.
The Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning
The Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL) is one of 16 National Foreign Language Resource Centers (LRC's) funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
Gateway to Chinese
This site offers a collection of free interactive language learning resources for beginning Mandarin Chinese. Students now have the option to practice pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, listening, and reading skills at their own convenience.
Library of Congress
The Library preserves and provides access to a rich, diverse and enduring source of knowledge to inform, inspire and engage you in your intellectual and creative endeavors. Whether you are new to the Library of Congress or an experienced researcher, we have a world-class staff ready to assist you online and in person.
LibriVox
LibriVox makes books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.
Lingu@net World Wide
Comprehensive resource for a wide range of languages. Search by language, proficiency level, and source language. Each language has a large number of resources.
National Geographic -People & Culture
The National Geographic online website and resource.
Open Culture - Learning Resources for 48 Languages
This collection features lessons in 48 languages, including Spanish, French, English, Mandarin, Italian, Russian and more. Download audio lessons to your computer or mp3 player and you're good to go.
World Language Resources
List of resources (for mostly French, Spanish and German) compiled as part of a federally funded grant to identify open educational resources for World Language teachers in Maine.

Open Library

Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published. Read, borrow, and discover more than 3M books for free.

Open Textbook Library

Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Education Network.