LibGuides: Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration: Open Educational Resources

What are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

"Open Educational Resources" by Ron Mader is licensed under CC BY 2.0

OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. ~ William & Flora Hewlett Foundation

For a more comprehensive overview on OER, see:

Open Educational Resources - a guide designed to assist faculty in the exploration, identification, selection and adoption of Open Educational Resources.

Understanding OER in 11 Videos

Go to the video playlist on YouTube to view each video individually or watch all 10 videos continuously below.

Open Educational Resources in Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Technology

These are examples of several Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Technology-related OER. Additional OER in this subject may be found by searching the resources listed on the ACC Libraries primary Open Educational Resources Guide.

HVACR Education
With years of experience in the field, the HVACReducation.net group provides a variety of comprehensive and training programs for students in the related fields of heating, ventilating and air conditioning. While their organization does have a number of professional development programs for more advanced learners, their website also features a number of instructional modules and learning exercises for novices. Most of these educational resources can be found under the "Curriculum" section of the site. Here, visitors can look over modules that deal with electrical systems, refrigeration principles, and the basic electrical systems of such devices. After looking over those materials, visitors may wish to continue on by looking over their schedule of classes and upcoming conferences.
Introduction to Heating
This video introduces HVAC, the role heating plays in HVAC, and heating equipment found for both residential and commercial settings.

OER Search Engines, Repositories, Referatories & More

OER Commons OER Commons is a dynamic digital library and network. Explore open education resources and join our network of educators dedicated to curriculum improvement. OER Commons helps educators, students, and lifelong learners avoid time-consuming searches and find exactly the right materials. With a single point of access from which they can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons’ growing collection.
OASIS Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 88 different sources and contains 352,345 records.
George Mason OER MetaFinder George Mason University Libraries developed a one-stop search box for Open and Affordable Educational Resources.
SkillsCommon The US Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program has created a free and open online library called SkillsCommons containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development. The Open Educational Resources (OER) are produced by community colleges across the nation and can be found, reused, revised, retained, redistributed and remixed by individuals, institutions, and industry.
OER Consortium The Open Education Consortium in collaboration with MERLOT offers a search engine on OER. General search yields results from the integrated database of the Open Education Consortium and MERLOT.
MERLOT MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community. MERLOT does not house content, but is a collection of links to other content.
Teaching Commons 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.
Writing Commons A free, comprehensive, peer-reviewed, award-winning Open Text for students and faculty in college-level courses that require writing and research.
Online Writing Lab: Excelsior College Excelsior College OWL is unique in its multimedia support for writers. It offers a wide variety of interactive multimedia activities, quizzes, videos, interactive PDFs, and games – all designed to help writers understand important concepts about writing.
Open Washington Designed to help educators understand the OER movement and find OER. The site include links to finding content, images and videos as well as testimonials from faculty who have adopted OER.
Academic Earth Collection of online courses and video lectures from 25 universities including MIT, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and Princeton.
AMSER (Applied Math & Science Education Repository) Is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.
The Orange Grove Florida's Open Educational Resource Repository.
Coerll - 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. The overall mission of these federally-funded centers is to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages by producing resources (materials and best practices) that can be profitably employed in a variety of settings.
Cool4Ed - Course Showcase The California Open Education Resources Council, a collaboration among UC, CSU and CCC faculty, is facilitating the peer review of open textbooks which are showcased in the California Open Source Digital Library (COOL4Ed). The COOL4Ed Course Showcase will eventually reflect approximately 50 courses and a number of peer reviewed open textbooks for each course.
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.