This post was contributed by Kyle Collins, Associate Dean of Online and Blended Learning at Northeast Iowa Community College. 

Finding OER for Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses can be difficult, but there are resources available to help! This month’s blog post will help you find CTE resources that are open, free to access, and can support your curriculum.

Skills Commons, an online library containing free and open learning and program support for job-driven workforce development, has used multiple methods for capturing open educational practices in teaching, learning, and institutional ePortfolios. Created by the US Department of Labor’s for storing resources created through their Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program, Skills Commons has a wide range of CTE content available in various formats. It may be difficult to browse for new users, though, so be patient as you explore. 

CTE Online is another online library of educational content aimed at providing CTE content specifically. Created by the Career and College Transition Division at the California Department of Education, CTE Online contains a wide range of downloadable documents, lesson plans, and other resources to support CTE courses in both K-12 and higher education environments. All resources on the site are available under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license. Browse by topic or search for a specific course to see what is available in your area!

OER Commons, a repository and referatory (meaning it both hosts content and “points to” content hosted elsewhere), is a great place to find CTE resources as well. CTE resources from Skills Commons, the Open Textbook Library, and OER created within OER Commons can all be found here. Some users have even created curated collections of CTE OER, to make finding this content easier for users: Career and Technical Education (CTE) Textbooks Collection 

MERLOT (Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is one of the oldest OER repositories and referatories available today. The site, developed by California State University, contains a wide range of content, including both open and closed resources. Although some of the resources available are at the K-12 level, the bulk of the resources on the MERLOT site are aimed at instructors working in higher education and touch on a wide range of subject matter.

These are a few OER resources to get you started. I encourage you to reach out to your institution’s OER leader to assist you in finding more resources. You may also reach out to the Iowa OER Community for more support. Send out a message on our mailing list for help locating materials for a specific course, or to find resources to get you started creating your own!