Faculty Resources
Affordable Learning
Create a More Equitable and Inclusive Classroom.
Make a direct impact on student success and retention by providing accessible course materials.
Increase Educational Access
Choosing Open Educational Resources (OER) or digital resources provides your students with greater flexibility. Your students will no longer have to fall behind waiting for financial aid or searching for discounted books to arrive from sellers.
Increase Learning Accessibility
Digital course materials are generally more compatible for assistive technologies and supplemental learning tools than print versions. The accessibility of learning content for all students, including students with disabilities, must be addressed in the shift to digital instructional materials.
Customize Learning Materials
Customize your course materials with readings, audio or videos make it possible to develop interactive learning environments to support new ways of learning that offer inclusive and tangible examples that resonant with unique student populations.
Professional Development Funding
The California State University (CSU) Chancellor’s Office has awarded our University funding to expand the impact of the CSU Affordable Learning Solutions initiative. As part of that, SF State has been providing $250 to $750 per faculty in cash grants to help faculty deliver affordable, zero cost-course materials to students across various departments! With our year-round open grant applications, you can receive cash grants to make your project idea(s) a reality and positively impact student success.
Designed with faculty in mind, submit your AIM grant application via Qualtrics. Join your colleagues and community of faculty who are dedicated to student success — the heart of our campus.
Open Educational Resource (OER) Implementation
Learn how to implement OER in your course and make a positive impact on students.
Adopt OER: Replace High-Cost Materials
Our OER Resource Hub has a wealth of easily accessible affordable learning materials that have been peer reviewed by faculty and/or subject matter experts. These OERs are applicable to a wide variety of disciplines and courses.
- Attribute the OER Note: Information from this page has been derived from Canvas Instructure.
- Attribute the OER to properly give credit to the creator or copyright holders as required by U.S. copyright law. A good rule of thumb is to follow TASL (Title, Author, Source, License)
- Deliver OER to Students: Provide a link for students to view the OER online or to download it. For assistance with accessibility, please contact:
- SF State’s Disability Programs and Resource Center (DPRC)
email: dprc@sfsu.edu
phone: (415) 338-2472
website: access.sfsu.edu
- SF State’s Disability Programs and Resource Center (DPRC)
Encourage feedback from your students on usability and access; their feedback is an important component of successful course transition to OER.
- Next Steps: Receive funding for your idea through our year-round open grant applications.
- All 100% of applicants have received funding!
Share your success story with us on social media!
Get featured in our Instagram or Twitter stories and get highlighted in our faculty engaging posts:
Use the hashtag #SFStateAffordableLearning
Adapt OER: Readily Available Materials
- Edit the OER: Check the license to make sure you have the permission to modify the contents.
It is easiest to edit the OER using its original format. Please note: Avoid PDF documents as they are not editable and will need to be converted to other formats before editing.
- Best tools for editing OER:
- Attribute the OER: Attribute the OER to properly give credit to the creator or copyright holders as required by U.S. copyright law. A good rule is to follow TASL (Title, Author, Source, License)
- Deliver OER to Students: Provide a link for students to view the OER online or to download it. For assistance with accessibility, please contact:
- SF State’s Disability Programs and Resource Center (DPRC)
email: dprc@sfsu.edu
phone: (415) 338-2472
website: access.sfsu.edu
- SF State’s Disability Programs and Resource Center (DPRC)
Encourage feedback from your students on usability and access; their feedback is an important component of successful course transition to OER.
- Next Steps: Receive funding for your idea through our year-round open grant applications.
- All 100% of applicants have received funding!
Share your success story with us on social media! Get featured in our social media stories and get highlighted in our posts.
Hashtag #SFStateAffordableLearning
SFSU Resources
Curated lists of Open Educational Resources (OER) resources to help you develop your courses and build stronger engagement with your students.
Accessible Media Quick Converter
The Accessible Media Quick converter can be used to quickly convert your electronic files into popular accessible formats: Audio, Doc, PDF, e-books.
For more information on what the tool does, please view this YouTube video of Sensus Access.
J. Paul Leonard Library
OneSearch Online Articles, Magazines & Journals
Course Reserves Request: Submit a request for the Library to purchase a book or e-book to be placed on reserve for your students
SF State Streaming Services:
Kanopy: Streaming video platform that offers movies, documentaries, international cinema, classic cinema, independent films, and educational videos.
SFSU Software
Microsoft Office 365 and Windows for Students:
Students enrolled full-time or part-time are eligible for a FREE version of Microsoft Office 365.
Adobe Creative Cloud (CC):
Adobe Creative Cloud is a set of applications and services from Adobe Inc. Users have access to a collection of 20+ desktop and mobile apps.
Multimedia
DIVA (diva.sfsu.edu)
Digital Image and Video Archive (DIVA) is an open digital collections archive. It combines unique media, scholarly materials, and hidden treasures from the campus’s historic local impact.
The Library's large film and video collection includes Hollywood features, foreign features, instructional programs and more.
Other Resources
Discover over 400,000 high-resolution art images categorized by artist, material, geography and period (No Rights reserved).
National Gallery of Art Images
Search over 45,000 high-resolution art images available to scholar, educators and the general public to support academic research and teaching by nurturing artistic appreciation.
View over 300,000 high-resolution art images searchable by artist, material, geography, period, color and technique (No Rights Reserved).
Discover the digital archive of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition history, including primary documents, an index of participating artists and catalogues. Please note: the MOMA’s Art Collection is separate and is neither free nor open.
The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts.
Merlot provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers. CSU-sponsored this search tool with user ratings and peer reviews. Advanced search feature lets you refine and target your search.
The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts.
The OER Meta finder performs a simultaneous search across 19 different sources of open educational materials.
Curated list of open multimedia resources that can be used individually to augment course material of combined to replace course textbook.
Scroll to the bottom of the page to change the usage rights filter to search for free and open materials. For images, any search term will do. For textbooks, include "open or e textbook" in your search terms.
The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.
Open-access journals, books, and other resources for teachers who use writing in their courses.
OpenStax CNX offers content which comes in modules (which are like small, "knowledge chunks") and collections (which are groups of modules structured into books or course notes, or for other uses). Use Advanced Search.
Primarily organized as courses or course topics: all the materials, none of the interaction Open University UK's major contribution to OER.
Digital Public Library of America
Search through photographs, oral histories, museum objects, artwork and government documents in a library that strives to maximize access to shared history, culture and knowledge.
SF State students may receive a free library card. A San Francisco Public Library card opens the door to a world of information and entertainment. In addition to borrowing books, LPs, and museum passes, your card allows you to download digital media, use electronic databases, take online classes, use library computers, and more.
Search available literary works, videos, photos, audio, scientific research and more using.
A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Browse journal articles in diverse scientific subject areas.
Directory of Open Access Journals
Discover open access journals in over 80 languages, representing 124 different countries.
Search through peer-reviewed health education resources.
View a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, available from the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
Discover over 400,000 free stock photos available for commercial use.
Search for accessible high quality stock photos.
Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license.
Millions of free photos and graphic resources. All that you need for your Creative Projects.
Over 2 million free high-resolution images brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers.
Free stock photos you can use everywhere.
Find your perfect free image or video to download and use for anything.
View a collection of open textbooks applicable to courses with high-enrollment, including trade and tourism.
Browse through eTextbooks in multiple disciplines that are free with ads; initial download requires an email address.
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
Browse an index of online textbooks categorized by department.
Search open textbooks and course materials across disciplines, sponsored by a collaboration between the CSU, UC and CCC.
Information Systems for Business And Beyond
Review Information Systems for Business and Beyond accessible textbooks and supplemental materials.
View free practice exercises and instructional videos on different topics, including science, math, history, art history, economics and more.
The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.
Browse math, engineering and science textbooks, categorized by department (free and purchase required resources).
Browse limited and high-quality selection of open textbooks, modules and pages for large, intro courses.
Browse through a digital ecosystem that offers resources in the format of books, course notes, or small collections covering a variety of disciplines.
View peer reviewed and open licensed textbooks in multiple disciplines.
Search through approximately 100 downloadable open textbooks, using either ctrl+F for PC or cmd+F for Mac.
SkillsCommons is a free and open online library containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development.
University of Minnesota Libraries
The open textbooks have been published by the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing and are licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed.