Open educational resources

Open educational resources, often called OER, are special teaching and learning materials that are free for everyone to use. These materials can be used, shared, and usually changed to fit different needs. The idea behind OER is to make learning easier and more accessible for everyone, no matter where they live or what their situation is.

These resources are created to help make education more open. They let teachers and students change materials to better fit local needs and learning goals. By using good teaching practices, OER aim to improve the way people learn and teach.

The push for open educational resources often comes from a wish to offer better ways of education. They provide an alternative to traditional materials, giving more flexibility and opportunity to both educators and learners around the world.

Definition and scope

Open educational resources, or OER, are materials made for teaching, learning, and research. Anyone can use, share, and change them for free. These resources are shared so everyone can access them easily.

The idea of OER began in 2002 at a meeting organized by UNESCO. OER include things like courses, videos, textbooks, and software. Anyone can use them without paying. These resources can be reused, changed, mixed with other materials, and shared with others. This is because they have special licenses that allow free use for learning and teaching.

Open textbooks

Main article: open textbook

The Open Textbook Library, supported by the University of Minnesota, provides free books for many subjects such as law, medicine, engineering, and arts.

OpenStax is a nonprofit group at Rice University that has been creating free books since 2012. LibreTexts is another nonprofit group that shares free learning materials. The Pressbooks Directory is a free list of many free books from different organizations.

History

The idea of using digital materials in teaching started in 1994 when Wayne Hodgins introduced the term "learning object". This idea became popular because it made it easier to reuse materials in many teaching situations.

The movement for open educational resources (OER) grew from open learning and a culture of sharing knowledge. In 1998, David Wiley introduced the idea of "open content", comparing it to open source software. In 2001, the MIT OpenCourseWare project began, making MIT's entire course catalog available online. This started a global movement for OER. Other projects followed, like Connexions, started by Richard Baraniuk in 1999, and the NROC Project in 2003.

In 2002, the term "open educational resources" was first used at a UNESCO forum. Many countries and organizations have supported sharing free educational materials. In 2012, the Paris OER Declaration was created, and in 2018, the Ljubljana OER Action Plan was adopted to help achieve the goal of quality education for everyone.

Advantages and disadvantages

Open educational resources (OER) have many benefits. They let learners study anywhere and anytime. Teachers can change the materials to focus on important topics. Different kinds of content, like pictures and videos, can help make learning more interesting. Sharing information online is faster than printing books. Students save money because they don’t need to buy textbooks, and teachers save time because lessons are already online.

However, there are some challenges. Sometimes the information online might not be correct or up-to-date. Sharing materials online means creators need to decide what to share carefully. Not all students have good internet or the right tools to use these resources. Since many OER are in English, this can make it hard for people who speak other languages. Also, some schools and teachers still don’t know much about OER, which can limit how much they are used.

Licensing and types

Open educational resources are special teaching materials that you can use, share, and even change. Normally, books and other learning tools are protected by copyright, so you can't change them. But now there are easier ways to share these materials thanks to groups like Creative Commons. They create licenses that let people use and change the materials more freely.

There are also free online courses called Massive open online courses or MOOCs. These courses are available to anyone and cover many different subjects. Types of open educational resources include whole courses, parts of courses, videos, tests, software, and more tools to help people learn. These resources can be static, meaning they don’t change, or dynamic, meaning they can change as people use and update them.

OER policy

OER policies are rules that help schools and groups share free learning materials. These materials are called open educational resources. They are meant to be easy for everyone to find and use. These policies help people share and improve educational content.

Research

The idea of open educational resources (OER) has led to many studies around the world. Researchers look at how OER can help students learn better and save money on books and materials. They also study how teachers and students feel about using OER.

Some important areas of research include how much money is saved, how well students learn with OER, and what people think about them. Studies show that OER can help students learn just as well as traditional materials but cost much less. Many teachers and students like using OER.

Programs like the OER Research Fellowship in North America and support from the Open University in the UK help more researchers study OER. These programs give funding and support to students and early-career researchers around the world. However, more careful research is needed to fully understand how OER can improve learning.

Some studies show that students use websites like Wikipedia often as educational materials. This suggests schools might want to pay more attention to how students use these resources.

Open educational practices

Main article: Open educational practices

Open educational resources (OER) are used in many ways to help teach and learn. Two common terms for these ways are "open pedagogy" and "open educational practices." Both terms talk about using free materials like videos and podcasts to help students learn and connect with others.

Some people also talk about "OER-enabled pedagogy," which means teaching methods that work best when using OER. These practices help make learning better and more flexible for everyone.

Costs

A big benefit of open educational resources (OER) is that they can help save money. Many students cannot buy textbooks because they are too expensive, but OER offer free options. While using OER can save money overall, creating and adapting them sometimes costs money too.

OER can be made from existing free materials, which saves even more money. But some OER need to be made from scratch, which also costs money. Different ways of making OER have different costs, and sometimes setting up the systems to share OER can be expensive at first.

Institutional support

Many universities and groups helped start open educational resources (OER). The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave money to support OER. MIT also got funding. Other groups like the Shuttleworth Foundation and UK funding bodies JISC and HEFCE helped too.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) shows countries how useful OER can be. In 2012, the Paris OER Declaration was approved in Paris.

Today, many colleges help teachers use OER. They might give money, time off from teaching, or help with planning lessons. Research shows OER can help students learn better, especially in writing, and save teachers time.

Initiatives

SkillsCommons began in 2012 to help schools share free learning materials. Over 700 schools joined, and by 2019, it had more than two million downloads.

Another project, OpenStax CNX, started at Rice University in 1999. It creates free resources anyone can use, change, and share. In 2012, OpenStax began making high-quality, free textbooks for college students.

Other projects come from MIT OpenCourseWare, like China Open Resources for Education and OpenCourseWare in Japan. The OpenCourseWare Consortium connects schools worldwide to share free course materials.

OER Africa works to bring free educational resources to schools in Africa. The OER4Schools project helps train teachers to use these resources.

Wikiwijs in the Netherlands promoted free educational materials in Dutch schools. The Open Educational Resources Programme in the United Kingdom supported projects to make learning resources free for everyone.

In 2003, Wikipedia and Wiktionary joined the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit group that creates and shares free educational content.

OER Commons, started in 2007, helps teachers find and share free educational resources. It also offers tools to match resources with school standards.

Curriki is a non-profit group that provides a website for sharing free teaching materials. WikiEducator, started in 2006, helps educators use free tools to create and share content.

The OL COS project in Europe encouraged the sharing of free educational resources. Peer production, where people work together online, has been used to create free materials like the Writing Commons.

In India, the University of Mumbai created a free online portal with resources on economics. The Saylor Foundation provides free college-level courses.

The African Virtual University shared free teacher education modules. Tidewater Community College created the first degree using only free educational resources.

Northern Virginia Community College used free resources for degrees, saving students over two million dollars. Nordic OER promotes free education in Nordic countries. The Norwegian Digital Learning Arena offers free digital resources for secondary education.

In Sweden, there is growing interest in sharing free educational resources. The CK-12 Foundation in California provides free resources for K-12 schools. The LATIn Project helps create free textbooks for Latin American universities.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation started the OER World Map to document free educational resources worldwide. During COVID-19, some groups created free online hubs to help teachers and students learn remotely.

Several universities now use free educational resources. Initiatives like Affordability Counts in Florida help make education more affordable. Oregon offers many free textbooks for teachers. The Universal Open Textbook Initiative began in 2024 to improve and translate free textbooks worldwide.

International programs

Free educational resources can help support learning in different parts of the world.

• Europe – The Learning Resource Exchange for schools, started by European Schoolnet in 2004, helps educators find free resources.
• India – The National Council Of Educational Research and Training made all textbooks from 1st to 12th standard free online.
• US – Washington State's Open Course Library provides free materials for popular college courses.
• Japan – The Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium promotes free educational resources in Japan.
• Dominica – The Free Curricula Centre creates videos and formats textbooks for phones and tablets.
• Bangladesh – The country made all textbooks for grades 1–12 free online.
• Uruguay – In 2011, the country aimed to gather 1,000 digital learning resources.
• South Korea – In 2011, the country planned to digitize all textbooks and give all students computers by 2015.
• California – The California Learning Resources Network started a free digital textbook initiative for high schools.
• Michigan – The state funded the Michigan Open Book Project in 2014.
• South Africa – The Shuttleworth Foundation created free science texts for high schools.
• Saudi Arabia – The country digitized math and science textbooks in 2008 and planned to digitize all textbooks by 2011.
• Arab League – ALECSO and the U.S. State Department started an Open Book Project in 2013 to create Arabic-language free educational resources.

As awareness of free educational resources grows, UNESCO adopted a global logo to represent these resources.

Major academic conferences

Many important meetings happen each year about open education and open educational resources (OER). The Open Education Conference is held every year in North America, including the United States and Canada. In Europe, the OER Conference happens yearly. Open Education Global holds the OE Global Conference in different places around the world each year. The Creative Commons Global Summit also happens yearly, and open education and OER are important topics discussed there.

OER competence development, OER training and OER certification

Different groups help people learn how to use open educational resources well. A guide from the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie lists important skills for using these resources.

In 2021, many schools in Austria did not have full training programs for using open educational resources. But, many schools offered single workshops or rewards for creating these resources. In 2022, Austria began a certification process to help schools show they are good at using and supporting open educational resources.

Critical discourse about OER as a movement

External discourse

Some people think the open educational resources (OER) movement doesn't reach everyone. They believe OER can only help countries if more people know how useful they are.

There are also questions about why OER exists. Some say it might be because richer countries share their ideas, even if it doesn't always match what poorer countries need.

To help with this, a research project called Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) studies how OER can be made in developing countries to better fit local needs. This project also works with teachers in places like Karnataka to help them create OER in local languages.

Internal discourse

Even within the OER movement, there are different ideas about what OER should be. For example, some free online courses don’t really give full freedom because they charge for certificates. Also, different symbols used for OER can mean different levels of support for the movement.

Stephen Downes says that making OER is interesting because, in the end, people learn more when they help create the resources themselves.