Open Educational Resources for Psychology

Is your district all abuzz with "Open Educational Resources" (OER) news? Did you see the video the White House/Michelle Obama posted about the free ebooks available for schools/students? There's quite a bit of chatter about it in my district, and I'm cautiously intrigued.

The promise of free, high quality resources for psychology teachers and students is obviously attractive, and it fits with the general "give psychology away for free" sentiment of our community. I love the tendency of psychology teachers to SHARE, freely and without concern for credit, etc. It's made our community stronger, and more high school students have access to high quality materials.

I have some mixed feeling, though: publishers of traditional textbooks (shout out to Worth and other publishers!) provided great, non-free resources to us in the past, and I wonder what might be lost if the OER movement eats into their market share. I hope the world of textbooks evolves toward some kind of balance between open, free resources and for-cost textbook (and other) materials.

As that evolution progresses, there are MANY free resources available to you and your students! This site provides a good overview of the OER "movement."

OER Commons

I'm intrigued by this free OER college level Psych textbook. I wonder if any AP teachers use this book yet, and how the college board might react to it during the syllabus audit?

Open Stax Psychology Textbook

 Psycholgist Rajiv Jhangiani posted a list of OER psychology links on his blog:

• BC Open Textbook Project: http://open.bccampus.ca/ 
• Resources for Teaching Research and Statistics in Psychology http://www.teachpsychscience.org/
• Go Cognitive: http://www.gocognitive.net
• Cognitive Psychology Wiki: http://cognitivepsychology.wikidot.com/
• STP Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology: http://teachpsych.org/otrp/resources/index.php
• APA Online Psychology Laboratory: http://opl.apa.org/
• Personality Pedagogy: http://personalitypedagogy.arcadia.edu/
• Animations for Teaching: http://garyfisk.com/anim/index.html
• Social Psychology Teaching Resources: http://www.socialpsychology.org/teaching.htm
• Timothy Bender’s Memory and Cognition Demonstrations: http://courses.missouristate.edu/timothybender/mem/mydemos.html
• Rossman/Chance Applet Collection: http://www.rossmanchance.com/applets/index.html
• Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education https://www.causeweb.org/webinar/activity/
• Interpreting Correlations: http://rpsychologist.com/d3/correlation/
• The Brain from Top to Bottom: http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/
• Research Methods Knowledge Base: http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/
• Fostering Sustainable Behavior (textbook): http://www.cbsm.com/pages/guide/preface/
• TED Ed: Psychology: http://ed.ted.com/lessons?category=psychology
• Psychology Tutorials and Animations: http://psych.hanover.edu/Krantz/tutor.htm

If you know of other resources, please post them in the comments. Happy hunting!

posted by Rob McEntarffer