Open educational resources

Open educational resources are digital materials intended for teaching, learning, competence development or education.

Open educational resources are licensed with a license that grants others the right to free access, use, modification, and redistribution with minimal or no restrictions. They are commonly known by the abbreviation OER, which stands for Open Educational Resources.

In this section, we will explore four open educational resource services, one domestic and one international. Open educational materials can also be found on the websites of educational institutions and universities, through services maintained by various associations, or via Finna search services. You can find some examples of these from this page.

In the Library of Open Educational Resources, you can search for and share open educational resources (OER) from all levels of education. The service and its OERs are available for use by teachers, learners of all ages and everyone interested in learning. The OERs can also be found in Finna.fi, a search service that collects material from hundreds of Finnish organizations. The aoe.fi service is owned by the Finnish National Agency for Education, which develops the service in collaboration with its partners.

On the homepage of the service, there are three dropdown menus that allow you to select: 

• Education level

• Subject, degree, or field of science 

• Type of learning material

By typing a keyword or words into the search box above the dropdown menus, you will get related learning materials regardless of the education level. For example, by trying the keyword "music," you will get 73 search results (spring 2025), which relate to early childhood education, high school music teaching, and practicing scales and keys. The search results can be refined using the options in the menu on the left side of the search results page, for example, to focus on a specific education level or to find more precise, music-related learning materials based on keywords. One of those is Urkumusiikki.fi, which is a learning environment that enables an easy and enjoyable way to explore organs and organ music.

You can learn about open education and open educational resources from here.

Open Music Academy (OMA) is the open platform for learning and teaching music. Everyone can contribute: musicians and music students can make their knowledge available as an open educational resource (OER) under a Creative Commons -license. OMA is free of charge and easy to use. OMA is a project of the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich. Ultimate goal for OMA is to become a community project that is supported around the world.

Contents of OMA is mainly in German, but you can search for English content from the front page with search terms. Guide to the contents and for the searching is here.

Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost and without needing to ask permission. Unlike traditionally copyrighted resources, OER have been licensed by the authors to permit no-cost access, reuse, adaptation and redistribution. They may also exist in the public domain, free of all copyright restrictions. In some cases that means you can download a resource and share it with your colleagues or fellow students. In other cases, you may be able to download a resource, edit it in some way and then re-post it as a remixed work.

Open Educational Resources (OER) contains open learning materials, currently (July 2025) comprising over 50,000 different open educational resources. The range of materials is very broad, from complete university courses to open textbooks. The service also includes various curated collections, which can be found via the Discover dropdown menu on the homepage. For example, there is a collection from Carnegie Hall's Weill Music Institute. Using the dropdown menus on the homepage, users can filter searches to focus on specific fields of study and levels of education, like Finnish OER. All materials in the service are CC-licensed, and the usage terms are specified for each item.

A test search with the keyword "music" and filtering by the field "arts and humanities" yielded 649 results (March 2025). The search results always indicate who produced the material, when it was added to the service, and what type of resource it is.

You can learn about OER from this libguide.

OERSI (Open Educational Resources Search Index) is a search engine for open educational resources in higher education, provided jointly by the University Library Center of North Rhine-Westphalia (hbz) and the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library (TIB).
OERSI offers a central search entry point for educational resources from distributed national and international providers with numerous filter options. Now, there are almost 100 000 open educational resources searchable via OERSI. Test search "music" gave 2801 results.

Other open educational resources

Digital resources for teaching and learning

List of resources, databases and useful websites by University of Arts, Helsinki. Includes 20th Century Music History, The Basics of Acoustics etc.

Learning resources

Selected study kits created and tested by teachers and students of the Folk Music Department at University of Arts, Helsinki. This section also includes other useful materials relevant to the study of folk music.. 

Opus 1 – composition pedagogy materials databank

Opus 1 – composition pedagogy materials databank is a gateway into the world of musical composition. It was published in Finnish in autumn 2018, and a partial version in English and Swedish was added in autumn 2020.

Opus 1 is a package for any institution or teacher providing music education, with inspiring insights into introductory teaching of composition and a diverse range of composition assignments particularly suitable for group tuition, small group tuition and individual tuition at music institutes. This databank has assignments for various skill levels from introductory to specialized. The topics are

• listening
• imagination & other arts
• musical elements
• musical structures and analysis
• music technology
• notation & music terminology
• playing an instrument & singing
• arrangements & parts
• styles & techniques
• interaction & cooperation