Open educational resources


Open educational resources are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to provide an alternative or enhanced educational paradigm.

Definition and scope

Open educational resources are part of a "range of processes" employed by researchers and educators to broaden access to scholarly and creative conversations. Although working definitions of the term OER may vary somewhat based on the context of their use, the 2019 definition provided by UNESCO provides shared language useful for shaping an understanding of the characteristics of OER. The 2019 UNESCO definition describes OER as "teaching, learning and research materials that make use of appropriate tools, such as open licensing, to permit their free reuse, continuous improvement and repurposing by others for educational purposes."
While collaboration, sharing, and openness have "been an ongoing feature of educational" and research practices "past and present", the term "OER" was first coined to describe associated resources at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on Open Courseware, which determined that "Open Educational Resources are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others."
Often cited is the 2007 report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation which defined OER as "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." The Foundation later updated its definition to describe OER as "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium digital or otherwise that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions." Of note in that definition is the explicit statement that OER can include both digital and non-digital resources, as well as the inclusion of several types of use that OER permit, inspired by 5R activities of OER. In a 2022 overview of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's activities supporting open education since 2002, the Foundation describes OER as "freely licensed, remixable learning resources", further including the Creative Commons definition of OER as "teaching, learning, and research materials that are either in the public domain or licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities retaining, remixing, revising, reusing and redistributing the resources."
The 5R activities/permissions mentioned in the definitions above were proposed by David Wiley, and include:
  • Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
  • Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways
  • Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
  • Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new
  • Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others
Authors, creators, and communities may apply a range of licenses or descriptions such as those facilitated by or to their work to communicate to what extent they intend for downstream users to engage in the 5R activities or other collaborative research, creative and scholarly practices.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development defines OER as: "digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use, and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licences". By way of comparison, the Commonwealth of Learning "has adopted the widest definition of Open Educational Resources as 'materials offered freely and openly to use and adapt for teaching, learning, development and research. The WikiEducator project suggests that OER refers "to educational resources that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing'. Institutions emphasizing recognition of work with open educational resources in faculty promotion and tenure emphasize their use in research, scholarly and creative works as well.
The above definitions expose some of the tensions that exist with OER:
  • Nature of the resource: Several of the definitions above limit the definition of OER to digital resources, while others consider that any educational resource can be included in the definition.
  • Source of the resource: While some of the definitions require a resource to be produced with an explicit educational aim in mind, others broaden this to include any resource which may potentially be used for learning.
  • Level of openness: Most definitions require that a resource be placed in the public domain or under a fully open license. Others require only that free use to be granted for educational purposes, possibly excluding commercial uses.
These definitions also have common elements, namely they all:
  • cover use and reuse, repurposing, and modification of the resources;
  • include free use for educational purposes by teachers and learners
  • encompass all types of digital media.
Given the diversity of users, creators and sponsors of open educational resources, it is not surprising to find a variety of use cases and requirements. For this reason, it may be as helpful to consider the differences between descriptions of open educational resources as it is to consider the descriptions themselves. One of several tensions in reaching a consensus description of OER is whether there should be explicit emphasis placed on specific technologies. For example, a video can be openly licensed and freely used without being a streaming video. A book can be openly licensed and freely used without being an electronic document. This technologically driven tension is deeply bound up with the discourse of open-source licensing. For more, see [|Licensing and Types of OER] later in this article.
There is also a tension between entities which find value in quantifying usage of OER and those which see such metrics as themselves being irrelevant to free and open resources. Those requiring metrics associated with OER are often those with economic investment in the technologies needed to access or provide electronic OER, those with economic interests potentially threatened by OER, or those requiring justification for the costs of implementing and maintaining the infrastructure or access to the freely available OER. While a semantic distinction can be made delineating the technologies used to access and host learning content from the content itself, these technologies are generally accepted as part of the collective of open educational resources.
Since OER are intended to be available for a variety of educational purposes, some organizations using OER neither award degrees nor provide academic or administrative support to students seeking college credits towards a diploma from a degree granting accredited institution. However, many degree granting institutions have intentionally embraced the use of OER for research, teaching and learning, seeing their use and creation as in aligning with academic or institutional mission statements. In open education, there is an emerging effort by some accredited institutions to offer free certifications, or achievement badges, to document and acknowledge the accomplishments of participants.
In order for educational resources to be OER, they must have an open license or otherwise communicate willingness for iterative reuse and/or modification. Many educational resources made available on the Internet are geared to allowing online access to digitalized educational content, but the materials themselves are restrictively licensed. These restrictions may complicate the reuse and modification considered characteristic of OER. Often, this is not intentional, as educators and researchers may lack familiarity with copyright law in their own jurisdictions, never mind internationally. International law and national laws of nearly all nations, and certainly of those who have signed onto the World Intellectual Property Organization, restrict all content under strict copyright. The Creative Commons license is a widely used licensing framework internationally used for OER.

Open textbooks

The Open Textbook Library sponsored by the University of Minnesota offers open textbooks a wide range of law, medicine, engineering, and liberal arts disciplines.
OpenStax, a nonprofit educational technology initiative based at Rice University, has created openly-licensed textbooks since 2012. The project was initially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Michelson Twenty Million Minds Foundation, and the Maxfield Foundation. The CNX platform was retired in 2020, when OpenStax transitioned to the use of Google Docs instead.
LibreTexts is a nonprofit OER project. Content from LibreTexts is made available under the CK-12 Foundation Curriculum Materials License. The CK-12 Foundation itself also provides—online—a suite of open educational content, typically under that license.
The Pressbooks Directory is a free, searchable catalog that includes over 8,200 open access books published by 199 organizations and networks using Pressbooks.
The B.C. Open Collection by BCcampus is a curated selection of OER that includes courses and textbooks that must meet quality criteria for it to be added to the collection.
The MERLOT Collection is a curated resource of free and online textbooks and other resources for use in teaching and learning. Many resources undergo an extensive peer review.
OER Commons provides an extensive library of OER textbooks and resources from higher education institutions around the world, as well as an OER authoring tool called Open Author.