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Open Education: Biological Sciences

A "getting started" guide overviewing open, editable, and lower-cost textbooks and open teaching & learning resources for faculty, students, and librarians.

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Biological Sciences

On this page you will find several openly licensed Biology textbooks along with supplemental material, interactive simulations, and other resources.

Discipline-specific pages are not intended to be exhaustive, but to showcase content that may be of interest to faculty considering adopting open educational resources for use in their classes. 

For more information about Creative Commons including license descriptions, please see the Creative Commons tab.

Open Textbooks

Additional Sources of Open Textbooks

NLM Bookshelf home page screenshotNLM / NCBI Bookshelf (National Library of Medicine / National Center for Biotechnology Information) "provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare." To use these materials, see the Copyright information.

Course materials: Lecture Videos, Interactive Simulations etc.

MIT Life Sciences Courses image"We present here a set of MIT courses that are Life Sciences-based. Pursuing an education in Life Sciences is both exciting and challenging, and we hope you experience both in viewing this collation!"  To re-use these materials, follow the CC BY NC SA permissions.

 

PhET logo

"PhET provides fun, free, interactive, research-based science and mathematics simulations. We extensively test and evaluate each simulation to ensure educational effectiveness."  To re-use these materials, follow the CC BY 3.0 permissions.

 

 

Science Forward logoScience Forward "videos have been produced by Science Forward to support inquiry-based basic science classes.  Students, we expect, will watch the videos and come to class with a wider range of basic questions, primed for discussion." To re-use these materials, follow the CC BY NC SA 4.0 permissions.

See also

Encyclopedia of LifeThe Encyclopedia of Life is an unprecedented effort to gather and share scientific knowledge about all living things in a single online resource, giving each of us a breathtaking view of our amazing world. To re-use these materials, follow the terms of use.