Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: OER for Art &amp; Design

Open Education Resources for Art & Design

The purpose of this section is to showcase content of interest to faculty who are considering adopting open educational resources for use in art and design-related courses. This list is by no means exhaustive. The nature of open educational resources is collaborative; we encourage comments about the content featured on this page and recommendations of resources not listed here.

Open Collections

MERLOT

The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder webpages, contributed by the MERLOT member community and intended to enhance teaching and learning.

OER Commons

OER Commons offers a collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER that you can search, browse, and evaluate, including full university courses, interactive mini-lessons and simulations, open textbooks, and adaptations of existing open work.

More Open Collections

Getty Research Portal
Over 30,000 art history publications, rare books, and related literature, from a variety of publishers. Includes many hard-to-find items.
Google Arts & Culture
Visit the virtual collections of thousands of museums.
Guggenheim Collection
Publications of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, downloadable through the Internet Archive.
Metropolitan Museum of Art: MetPublications
Five decades of Met publications on art history, available to read, download, and/or search for free.
Smarthistory
A free resource for the study of art history created by art historians Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. Smarthistory is an independent not-for-profit organization and the official partner to Khan Academy for art history.
World Digital Library
16,841 items about 193 countries between 8000 BCE and 2000, plus interactive maps.

Open Courses and Media

Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR)
A peer-populated platform for art history teachers offering a collectively authored online repository of art history teaching content including lesson plans, video introductions to museums, book reviews, image clusters, and classroom and museum activities.
Art Since 1950
A National Gallery of Art teaching packet discussing artistic movements of the late 20th century, including abstract expressionism, pop art, minimalism, conceptualism, process art, neo-expressionism, and postmodernism.
Art Through Time
From Annenberg Learner, this course consists of videos and learning materials exploring diverse cultural perspectives on shared human experiences.
ArtBabble
Showcases high quality art-related video content from more than 50 cultural institutions from around the world.
Boundless Art History
A curated catalog of educational content with most material licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-SA) license.
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Presents the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection via a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of global art history. Includes interactive maps & timeline, information and objects.
Italian Renaissance Learning Resources
A freely available resource exploring themes in Italian Renaissance art. Researchers and students can explore thematic essays, more than 300 images, 300 glossary items and 42 primary source texts.
TED -- Art
TED Talks from sculptors, painters, illustrators and photographers — and those who blur the boundaries.

Open Images

Art Cyclopedia: The Fine Art Search Engine
Index of online museums and image archives: find where the works of over 8000 different fine artists can be viewed online.
Artsy for Education
High-resolution, downloadable images of iconic works of art, as well as rich editorial content.
Europeana
Europeana provides access to artworks (and more) from thousands of European archives, libraries and museums – with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you locate content that meet your needs.
Frick Digital Collections
Digital collection of more than one million photographic reproductions of works of art by fourth to mid-twentieth century artists trained in the Western tradition.
Getty Open Content
Public domain art images from Getty collections.
Pexels
Free stock images and video browsable by color and collection.
Smithsonian Open Access
Download and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital collection items for free!
VADS (Visual Arts Data Service)
Online resource for visual arts that includes over 100,000 images as well as essays based on the image collections.