Open educational resources

Open educational resources, often called OER, are special teaching and learning materials that are made to be 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 with the intention of breaking down barriers to education. They allow teachers and students to adapt materials to better suit local contexts and specific learning goals. By using the best practices in teaching, OER aim to enhance the way people learn and teach.

The push for open educational resources often comes from a wish to offer better and different 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 created for teaching, learning, and research that are free for anyone to use, share, and change. These resources are shared openly so that everyone can access them easily.

The idea of OER started in 2002 at a meeting organized by UNESCO. They are resources like courses, videos, textbooks, and software that anyone can use without cost. These resources can be reused, changed, mixed with other materials, and shared with others. This is possible because they have special licenses that allow free use for learning and teaching.

Open textbooks

Main article: open textbook

The Open Textbook Library sponsored by the University of Minnesota offers free books for many subjects like law, medicine, engineering, and arts.

OpenStax is a nonprofit group at Rice University that has been making free books since 2012. LibreTexts is another nonprofit group that shares free learning materials. The Pressbooks Directory is a free list of over 8,200 free books from many organizations.

History

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

The movement for open educational resources (OER) started from developments in 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 sparked 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. Over the years, many countries and organizations have supported the sharing of 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, meaning 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 and ideas that governments, schools, and groups use to help make and use free learning materials. These materials are called open educational resources, and they are meant to be easy for everyone to access and use. These policies support the sharing and improving of educational content for everyone.

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 looking at how much money is saved, how well students learn with OER, how often they use 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 and detailed research is needed to fully understand how OER can improve learning and attitudes toward subjects like science.

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 because of special permissions that let anyone use, change, and share these resources freely. These practices help make learning better and more flexible for everyone.

Costs

One big advantage 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 put together 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 foundations helped start open educational resources (OER). The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave a lot of money to support OER in the early years, and MIT also received funding. Other groups like the Shuttleworth Foundation and UK funding bodies JISC and HEFCE also helped.

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

Today, many colleges help teachers use OER. They may offer money, time off from teaching, help with course design, and more. Research shows OER can help students learn better, especially in writing, saving teachers time.

Initiatives

SkillsCommons started in 2012 under the California State University Chancellor's Office, supported by a big funding program. It was led by Gerard Hanley and based on a project called MERLOT. Over 700 schools worked together to create and share free learning materials. By 2019, SkillsCommons had over two million downloads, making it one of the largest collections of free educational resources.

Another project, OpenStax CNX, began at Rice University in 1999. It focuses on creating free, open resources that anyone can use, change, and share. In 2012, OpenStax was created to make high-quality, free textbooks for college students. These books are reviewed by experts and can be used, changed, and shared freely.

Other projects come from MIT OpenCourseWare, like China Open Resources for Education and OpenCourseWare in Japan. The OpenCourseWare Consortium, started in 2005, connects over 200 schools worldwide to share free course materials.

OER Africa works to bring free educational resources to schools across Africa. The OER4Schools project helps train teachers in sub-Saharan Africa to use these resources effectively.

Wikiwijs in the Netherlands aimed to promote free educational materials in Dutch schools. The Open Educational Resources Programme in the United Kingdom was supported by several organizations to fund projects that make learning resources freely available worldwide.

In 2003, Wikipedia and Wiktionary became part of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to creating and sharing free educational content. Wikipedia is now one of the most visited websites globally.

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

Curriki is a non-profit group that provides a website for creating and sharing free curricula and teaching materials for students up to age 18. WikiEducator, launched in 2006, helps educators learn to use free tools for creating and sharing content.

The OL COS project in Europe aimed to encourage the creation and sharing of free educational resources. Peer production, where people work together online, has also been used to create free educational materials, like the Writing Commons and projects by the University of Minnesota.

In India, the University of Mumbai created a free online portal with resources on economics and soft skills. The Saylor Foundation works to provide free college-level courses. The University of Birmingham and the London School of Economics worked on a project to share digital learning resources.

The African Virtual University shared free teacher education modules and later created an online repository of resources in multiple languages. Tidewater Community College in the U.S. created the first degree based entirely on free educational resources.

Northern Virginia Community College developed degree pathways using free resources, saving students over two million dollars. Nordic OER is a network that promotes free education across Nordic countries. The Norwegian Digital Learning Arena offers free digital resources for upper secondary education.

In Sweden, there is growing interest in sharing free educational resources, though development is still slow. The CK-12 Foundation in California provides free, customizable educational 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. Eliademy.com began offering free courses in 2015. The University of Idaho helps K-12 teachers learn about free resources. The MGH Institute of Health Professions launched a system for sharing free reading lists for college courses.

Today, many universities rely on librarians to organize free educational resources. During COVID-19, some groups created free online hubs to help teachers and students learn remotely.

Several universities have started using free educational resources, including Open Michigan, BCcampus, and others. Initiatives like Affordability Counts in Florida and Affordable Learning Georgia help make education more affordable. Oregon offers many free textbooks and resources for teachers. The Universal Open Textbook Initiative began in 2024 to improve and translate free textbooks worldwide.

International programs

There are high hopes that free educational resources can help bridge the gap between different parts of the world and support development in less advanced economies.

• Europe – The Learning Resource Exchange for schools, started by European Schoolnet in 2004, helps educators find free resources from many countries.
• India – The National Council Of Educational Research and Training digitized all textbooks from 1st to 12th standard, making them free online.
• US – Washington State's Open Course Library provides free educational 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 better use on phones and tablets.
• Bangladesh – The country digitized all textbooks for grades 1–12 and offers them for free.
• Uruguay – In 2011, the country sought 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, though there were issues with the materials.
• 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 worldwide, UNESCO adopted a global logo to represent these resources.

Major academic conferences

Several important meetings happen each year focused on 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, there is the OER Conference held yearly. Open Education Global runs the OE Global Conference in different places around the world each year. The Creative Commons Global Summit also happens yearly, with open education and OER being one of the main subjects discussed.

OER competence development, OER training and OER certification

Different groups work on helping people learn the skills needed to use open educational resources well. One important guide comes from the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, which lists key skills for using these resources effectively.

Researchers in Austria found that in 2021, not many schools had full training programs for using open educational resources. However, many schools did offer single workshops or rewards for creating these resources. In 2022, Austria started a certification process to help schools prove they are good at using and supporting open educational resources.

Critical discourse about OER as a movement

External discourse

Some people say that the open educational resources (OER) movement doesn’t connect well with the whole world. They believe OER can only help countries reach their educational goals if more people learn about how useful they are.

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

To address 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.