Open Educational Resources and Open Textbooks: Open Educational Resources in Health Sciences

Adopting and Creating Open Educational Resources (OER)

Many open textbooks, open educational resources (OER), and other free teaching and learning materials have been produced for subject areas and specialties in health sciences, including the collections highlighted on this page. If you know of an excellent resource not listed here, tell us about it!

To discuss your specific needs, please contact your liaison librarian or schedule a consultation with the Open Education Librarian.

This guide was originally authored by Melanie Smith, UW Libraries Open Education Graduate Assistant 2021-2022.

General Collections

The platforms in this section provide freely available teaching and learning materials for a variety of health professions and health sciences subject areas.

Health Education Assets Library (HEAL)
HEAL is an extensive collection of digital materials for health sciences teaching and learning, including images and interactive resources. Search tip: To explore an individual collection, follow the link from the main HEAL page and add keywords after the terms already in the search box.
MedEdPORTAL
This open-access journal focuses on medical and dental education and publishes “stand-alone, complete teaching or learning modules that have been implemented and evaluated with medical or dental trainees or practitioners.”
MERLOT II Health Sciences
This resource includes case studies, animations, simulations, online courses and modules, textbooks and journal articles, tutorials, quizzes, and more. Filter by discipline, audience, platform, and peer-review status.
Pressbooks Directory: Healthcare Collection
This curated collection features books published across 110 Pressbooks networks. Some materials have restrictive licenses. Search by keyword and filter by subject, language, number of interactive H5P activities, and so on.
Open Michigan
Courses materials, including videos and lectures with learning objectives and more for dentistry, global health, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, statistics, and more.

Specialized Collections

Open RN: Open Resources for Nursing
Five peer-reviewed open textbooks and a collection of virtual (H5P) and virtual reality simulations were developed with a U.S. Department of Education grant and published with CC BY 4.0 licenses.
George Washington University OER for Nurse Educators
Interactive multimedia learning materials for use by nurse educators worldwide.
Climate Resources for Health Education (CRHE)
Repository of evidence-based resources to incorporate climate change and planetary health information into health educational curricula. Includes case studies, slide decks, learning objectives, and an implementation guide.
Graphic Medicine Syllabus Repository
Graphic medicine syllabi for undergraduate, graduate, and health professional courses, hosted by graphicmedicine.org. Not all syllabi are openly licensed. Contact course instructor for re-use permission.

Videos

Doctors Without Borders | MSF-USA
The videos on this channel include close-ups on world health issues, profiles of patients and aid workers, and consumer health information.
Khan Academy Videos | Medicine
The free educational videos produced by Khan Academy are openly licensed (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0), though they are mostly several years old. There are dedicated channels for MCAT and NCLEX-RN test prep.
OER from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology
Anatomical, pharmacological, and medical course videos shared on this now-dormant channel are available for reuse with Creative Commons licensing.
Medical Aid Films
Multilingual videos, mostly focused on women’s and children’s health, can be searched by keyword or sorted by audience, language, and topic. All have a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Clinical Skills Online (CSO)
This London-based project produced free online videos “demonstrating core clinical skills common to a wide range of medical and health-based courses.” Videos can be reused under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license. CSO’s YouTube channel also features a series on taking a patient’s history.

Images & Illustrations

Open-i Biomedical Image Search Engine
This service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine provides access to "abstracts and images (including charts, graphs, clinical images, etc.) from the open source literature, and biomedical image collections" Note that some images are not openly licensed for reuse. Filter search results by License Type and Image Type, and be certain to check the license terms before reusing any image or article.
Images from the History of Medicine – Public Domain
This selection from the U.S. National Library of Medicine's Digital Collections contains more than 44,000 public domain images that can be reused freely, including "fine art, photographs, engravings, and posters that illustrate the social and historical aspects of medicine dating from the 15th to 21st century.”
Public Health Image Library
“Created by a Working Group at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the PHIL offers an organized, universal electronic gateway to CDC's pictures." The historical images in this collection do not reflect current public health information, and some may be inappropriate by today’s standards.
Biology 351 Anatomical Illustrations
This student-created resource was published in March 2022 by Iowa State University. The author-illustrators were Biological & Pre-Medical Illustration students who had completed a course on comparative chordate anatomy.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Image Galleries
Contains many images in the public domain. Follow their instructions for how images should be used and credited, if necessary.
U.S. National Institutes of Health Image Gallery
The NIH's Flickr album. Check each image for any copyright information, including how and when to provide credit.
Wikimedia Commons
A collection of over 96 million freely usable media files. Read their instructions on how and when to provide credit.

Other Free Online Materials

English Language Videos - Global Health Media Project
Videos on childbirth, breastfeeding, care of newborns, family planning, and nutrition can be watched online at no cost. To download and use videos in teaching, university affiliates may be required to register and pay an annual fee.
Spanish language OER - Serlo: The Platform for Open Learning
List of repositories, search engines, and websites with OER licenses. Primarily Spanish, includes resources in English, French, Arabic, and Swahili.