Textbooks and workbooks can often be prohibitively expensive and, as such, there is a growing movement to create Open Educational Resources (OERs) for language learning. Below are some websites and textbooks to check out:
- Open Educational Resource Initiative
The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges has compiled several open educational resources for Spanish at a variety of levels, from beginner Spanish to Spanish for native speakers. These resources include open textbooks, literature, videos, grammar books, and assessments.
- Galileo
Galileo is an open textbook repository and contains several OERs for language learning for Spanish, Italian, and French.
- Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL)
COERLL is a project funded by the U.S. Department of Education working to promote the use and creation of OERs for language learning. It has a hub for language learning resources in 23 languages.
- Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library is a project of the University of Minnesota and holds over 1000 open textbooks on a variety of topics. The library contains open textbooks in over 30 languages.
- MERLOT
The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, or MERLOT, is an online repository of open educational resources such as videos, textbooks, websites, exercises, and much more. Their collection also holds resources specific to language learning.
- OER Commons
OER Commons is another repository of OERs that features over 100 language learning resources from syllabi to full courses. The repository features 21 languages.
For other applications that are conversation based, the Language Resource Center maintains a list of Conversation Partner Platforms that details the costs, benefits, and drawbacks of a variety of platforms.