What counts as an open educational resource
An open educational resource, usually shortened to OER, is a teaching or learning material that carries a license or public-domain status allowing others to use it without asking permission first. In most definitions, people may also adapt and share it. Typical examples are textbooks, lecture slides, lesson plans, quizzes, videos, images and whole course outlines.
The key word is “open”, and it refers to permissions, not price. A free PDF that you may read but not edit or redistribute is generally not treated as an OER. A resource that someone sells in print but licenses openly can be one. The most common framing breaks openness into permissions to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute, often called the 5Rs.
The term itself was adopted at a UNESCO forum in 2002, and the idea has since spread well beyond the university setting where it started.
Who produces open resources
The field has several kinds of producers, and they work differently.
- Individual teachers and lecturers who publish their own materials, often because they were going to write them anyway.
- Institutions that release course materials or fund staff to write them.
- Project-based groups and non-profits that coordinate the writing, review and editing of open textbooks or lesson collections.
- Governments and education ministries, some of which commission openly licensed materials for schools.
- Commercial publishers and companies, some of which release part of their material openly, usually alongside paid products or services.
- Volunteer communities, who contribute to shared encyclopedias, image collections and translations.
Quality control varies a great deal between these groups. A textbook that went through formal peer review and editing is a different thing from a single teacher’s slide deck, even if both carry the same license.
Where resources live
Open materials are scattered across many kinds of places, and finding them is a recurring complaint from teachers. Broadly, they sit in:
- subject or national collections, often called repositories and libraries, which catalog materials by topic and level;
- institutional sites and library-run collections;
- general platforms for sharing images, video and documents;
- the course systems that schools and colleges already use, such as learning management systems, where a teacher may embed or copy openly licensed pages.
Search tools and metadata standards help, but there is no single directory covering everything. Many resources also vanish when a project loses funding, which is one reason sustainability is a constant topic in the field.
The role of licenses
Licenses are the legal backbone of OER. The Creative Commons family of licenses is by far the best-known general approach, and it offers a set of conditions, such as requiring credit or forbidding commercial reuse. These choices matter in practice: a restriction on commercial use or on adaptations can limit what a teacher may do. Questions of copyright and licensing are where many first-time users get stuck, since a mixed collection may contain several different licenses, and combining them is not always allowed. General principles are worth learning, but for a specific case you should check the license text and, where it matters, ask the institution’s copyright contact.
Who uses open resources
Users are at least as varied as producers.
Teachers and lecturers use OER to replace or supplement commercial materials, to translate or localize content, or to build a course quickly. Students often meet OER without noticing, as a free textbook or a set of readings assigned by an instructor. Rising textbook costs are one of the main reasons students, and sometimes institutions, take an interest. Self-directed learners use open materials with no teacher involved. Librarians and instructional designers act as intermediaries, finding, vetting and adapting resources for others.
Use is not always the same as adoption in a formal sense. A teacher may borrow a single diagram from an open source for one lesson without it ever appearing in any count of “OER adoption”.
How the pieces fit together
It helps to picture the field as a chain with feedback loops:
- Creators write or adapt materials and choose a license.
- Hosts and collections store and describe them.
- Intermediaries such as libraries make them easier to find and check them for quality and accessibility.
- Teachers and students use, adapt and sometimes republish them.
- Funders and policymakers support the process, through grants, mandates or institutional support.
Weakness at any one link affects the others. A good textbook that nobody can find is not much use, and a well-run repository with little new content stalls. Policy attention has grown, including a UNESCO recommendation on OER adopted by its member states in 2019, and many national and local bodies now have an interest. Government support tends to be most visible where it pays for creation or sets expectations for publicly funded materials.
Practices, not just products
A newer strand of the field looks at what people do with open materials rather than at the materials themselves. Discussions of open educational practices cover things like students co-creating content, teachers sharing their methods, and courses built in public. Some people consider these practices more significant than the resources. Others point out that they are harder to define and measure.
Open questions
Several issues remain unsettled.
- Quality and trust. Open does not mean good, and users need ways to judge both.
- Sustainability. Many projects depend on short-term funding.
- Access to technology. Digital materials presuppose devices and connectivity, so the digital divide shapes who can benefit.
- Evidence. Studies of impact are growing but are mixed in what they measure and how reliably, a point covered in the more detailed articles in this section.
- Awareness. Surveys in various countries have often found that many instructors are unaware of OER or unsure how to use them, although the picture differs by place and discipline.
How to approach the field as a newcomer
If you are new, start with a narrow question rather than the whole field: a subject, an education level or a license question. Read license terms carefully, check the date and authorship of anything you plan to rely on, and treat large claims about impact with some caution. Outcomes depend heavily on how a resource is used, not only on whether it is open.