For the Common Good

Everyday learning and teaching
 
 

Edinburgh at its best

Open educational resource initiatives
 
 

Edinburgh’s Treasures

Open online collections
 
 

Sustainable Development Goals

Sustainable Development Goals We believe that OER can make a critical contribution to achieving the aims of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) which the University and Students Association are committed to through the SDG Accord. We have collected OERs from our showcase that are in line with specific SDG and listed them for ease of educators wishing to find SDG aligned resources. Sustainable Development Goal OERs

Blog Posts

Clouds Useless Interns and the Fragile Internet
July 22, 2026 4:39 pm by Sanika Prakash
The Open.Ed site has over 500 OER posts and about an equal number of blog posts, and I’ve been going through them manually in an audit, which has been time-consuming and repetitive.  When I’ve been asked about my job, many people have wondered why the whole process isn’t just automated. I’ve had a lot of questions on why I didn’t just use AI or code to scrape all of the data from WordPress and have believed that I had one of those ‘vanity internships’, where I get an experience for my LinkedIn but offer no real benefit for the company.  There are two very good reasons for this; copyright and the fragility of digital information. 
Lake by the Pentlands Intern Reflection: Guess who’s back (back again)?
June 25, 2026 2:30 pm by Sanika Prakash
I’m Sanika, and last year I was the Open Textbook Creation Intern for seven months working on Open Educational Resources and process documents for the new textbook service. I am back for the summer and this year I’ve gone technical with it, and as the OER Web Migration intern, I’ve thrown myself into the complex technological programming code world of… Microsoft Excel. I may be working for an IT company but at my heart I am a word person, and Excel allows me to excel at collating words in a giant web audit.
Celebrating Edinburgh Medical School and Nursing Studies: Reflections from my first weeks as an intern
June 22, 2026 3:23 pm by Ewan McAndrew
Guest post by Maya Field, Digital Heritage and Open Knowledge intern. Hello! I am Maya, this year’s Digital Heritage and Open Knowledge Intern at the University’s Information Services Group. My role this summer focuses on exploring the digital outputs that can be created to celebrate the heritage of both Edinburgh Medical School and Nursing Studies […]
Edinburgh old town landscape as seen from Princes Street Gardens. My first week as an Open Educational Resources Intern
June 10, 2026 1:03 pm by Charlotte Ness
Hello! I’m Charlotte, this year’s Open Educational Resources (OER) summer intern within the University’s Information Services Group. My first week of this internship has thus far been largely characterised by extensive reading – which, as a French and English Literature student, I assure you that I am quite accustomed to! In perusing both the OER service’s digital catalogue of published resources (on Open.Ed, TES Resources and Edinburgh Diamond, to name a few) and the vast array of online open access textbooks similarly published by other institutions, in such a brief span of time I feel I have already become thoroughly familiar with the department’s operations and its fundamental values, namely of providing widespread, barrier-free access to teaching and research materials of high quality.
The word policy being written by a hand with a blue pen OER Policy update – Copyright, AI and open licensing
May 13, 2026 10:32 am by Lorna M Campbell
University of Edinburgh teachers, learners and researchers have long been creating and sharing Open Educational Resources (OER) to the world, allowing high-quality teaching and learning resources to be reused and re-purposed to benefit all.  What happens though when Gen AI is used to help [...]

OER Channels

Edinburghs OERs
OERs from across the University

TES Resources
Award winning open resources for school teachers.

Short Online Courses
Free short online courses.

Edinburgh Diamond
Open Access ebooks & journals.

Open Media Bank
Videos from our MOOCs & free short online courses.

Media Hopper Create
Creative Commons licensed videos.

Open Media Stock Footage
Open licensed media snippets for downloading & reuse.

Wikimedian in Residence
Videos from our Wikimedian in Residence.

3D Models
Open licensed models of heritage, geology & anatomy artefacts.