Contributed by Samantha Peter

The Mason OER Metafinder, or fondly known as MOM, is one of the many great resources you can use to locate Open Educational Resources for your classroom. MOM is hosted by George Mason University Libraries and for specific information, you can contact Wally Grotophorst, the Associate University Librarian at wallyg@gmu.edu.  

As the Instructional Design Librarian at the University of Wyoming (UW) who works extensively with our university center for teaching and learning, I often get requests for finding OER. I, personally, tend to recommend MOM as a great place to start. This is because MOM is not like other discovery sites, (i.e OER Commons, MERLOT, etc), instead MOM is a federated search. A federated search works to pull information from a variety of sources, rather than a singular source (Wikipedia). This is similar to what most libraries also host. For example, at UW we have our ‘Quick Search’ which searches a large majority of our subscription databases and other holdings. These types of searches can be a great starting place for researchers because it provides them with a broad range of information in one place rather than having to search in numerous different places. For example, I recently did a search as part of a consult on resources for graduate-level Instructional Design courses. I did a quick search of MOM and was able to find a couple of really great resources from MERLOT, OASIS, and OER Commons:

1.     Instructional Technology and Media: https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/education-textbooks/7/

2.     Instructional Design: https://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=622444

3.     Instructional Design: https://www.oercommons.org/courses/instructional-design

4.     To access the search I conducted: check it out here.

Being able to search some of the major OER repositories in one place makes MOM a really incredible resource.

MOM currently searches all of the well-known OER repositories like MERLOT, OER Commons, OASIS, OpenStax, along with repositories like HaithiTrust, Internet Archive, and the Digital Public Library of America. This means it might take it a minute to search all of these resources so I often give the site a couple of minutes to load before I start browsing the results. This wide variety of resources also means you are casting a broad net and accessing “open” resources that you might not have found because they are in a smaller less-known repository. This is invaluable in finding a variety of course materials you can use when designing OER.

Interested in searching MOM? You can access it here: https://mom.gmu.edu

You can place a search widget for MOM on your website or LibGuide here: https://publishing.gmu.edu/the-mason-oer-metafinder-widget/

Works Cited

Wikipedia. Federated search. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_search

This post is by Sammy Peter and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.