OER Commons vs Saylor Academy

OER Commons is a free web-based digital library for finding open educational resources and collaborating on their use, evaluation and improvement. It serves K–12 and higher education educators, librarians and homeschooling parents. A free account, priced at free, provides library access, Open Author for creating or publishing resources, groups, collaboration to curate or remix content, and a personal profile for saved resources. Organizations can use Hubs to develop collections, manage content and facilitate conversations. Custom microsites can have their own libraries and domains, tailored metadata and content creation, and analytics dashboards. Open Author includes an accessibility checker, requires alt text for embedded images and automatically captions videos uploaded to a resource. ISKME offers data and API integration services for learning management systems; its tools can receive and provide harvestable content feeds in Dublin Core, IEEE Learning Object Metadata and RSS. ISKME reports completed accessibility audits and another review underway, but authors and users remain responsible for resource accessibility, and many indexed materials are hosted externally. Resources created in legacy Open Author 1 are scheduled for removal on December 31, 2026; Open Author 2 resources are unaffected.

Saylor University offers self-paced online courses, skill development programs, and graduate degrees. Its catalog lists 164 free courses spanning professional skills and college-level subjects. Materials are curated from free and open online resources by expert educators, and learners can earn free digital certificates by passing course exams. Some courses have ACE credit recommendations, but earning credit requires a proctored credit exam; optional proctoring costs $5 USD per exam session. The organization serves people pursuing personal or professional development, college credit, and graduate degrees. Learners can access courses on the web or use the Saylor University or Moodle mobile app on iOS and Android. Some activities can be downloaded for offline use, though some site features and settings are unavailable in the apps. Sign-in supports Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. Saylor says it collects account and usage information and does not sell personal information. Its privacy policy describes administrative, physical, and technical safeguards while noting that absolute security cannot be guaranteed. Saylor University is the primary initiative of the Constitution Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Michael J. Saylor.