Two ideas that are often confused
MOOCs and OERs are both called “open”, and people sometimes use the words as if they meant the same thing. They do not. A MOOC is a course: a structured experience delivered online to a large number of people, usually free to join. An open educational resource, or OER, is a material: a textbook, a lesson, a set of images, a quiz bank, released with permission to use it and usually to adapt and share it.
One way to remember the difference is to ask what you are allowed to do afterwards. You can often watch a MOOC for free, but you may not be allowed to copy its videos, translate them or build your own course out of them. With an openly licensed resource, those actions are usually permitted, within the license conditions.
The older roots of OER
The OER idea predates the MOOC wave. The term itself is often traced to a UNESCO forum in 2002, where it was used to describe educational materials made freely available for consultation and reuse. Earlier still, some universities and projects had begun putting course materials online for anyone to read. The Creative Commons licenses, introduced in the early 2000s, gave authors a standard, understandable way to grant permissions, which made sharing across institutions much simpler.
In later years, UNESCO adopted a formal recommendation on OER in 2019, which shows the idea had moved from a niche project to a topic of policy interest. Details of national policies vary, and anyone needing specifics for their own country should consult official sources.
What the MOOC wave added
In the early 2010s, MOOCs drew public attention to online learning on a scale that earlier projects had not. They showed that large numbers of people were willing to study online for no credit, and they pushed institutions to think about digital delivery. They also introduced many people to the phrase “open education”, sometimes with a narrow meaning of simply “free online courses”.
The limits of that meaning became clear over time. Many MOOC materials were made available under restrictive terms. Questions of copyright and licensing, which most learners had never needed to think about, suddenly mattered. Courses could be closed or changed by the provider, and content that learners relied on might not stay accessible. Teachers who wanted to include a lecture in their own classes might find they had no right to do so. In short, free to attend did not mean free to reuse.
Why attention moved to reusable materials
Several practical pressures drew interest toward OER in the years that followed.
- Textbook costs. For many students, the price of required books is a significant expense. Openly licensed textbooks offer a way to lower it, and these were among the most visible OER projects.
- Control for teachers. A teacher can fix errors, update examples and fit a text to the local curriculum when the license permits changes.
- Longevity. Because copies can be made and kept by anyone, an openly licensed resource is less dependent on one provider staying in business or keeping a service running.
- Cost of producing courses. Building a full online course from scratch is expensive. Reusing materials reduces duplicated effort.
None of this means MOOCs disappeared. They continued to evolve after the MOOC boom, and some adopted open licenses for part of their content. Many providers also moved toward paid certificates, micro-credentials or full online degrees, which changed their economics. The point is not that one replaced the other but that the conversation widened from “who can attend?” to “who can reuse and adapt?”.
How the two fit together
In practice the two often meet. A course might be built on an openly licensed textbook, and a MOOC’s materials might be released under an open license so that others can reuse them. A teacher might use a short open course as a supplement while assigning chapters of an open textbook. Schools often deliver all of this through the learning management systems they already use. The combination is most useful when each part does what it is good at: the course gives structure and pacing, the open materials give flexibility and durability.
Limits and cautions
OER have their own difficulties, and it would be misleading to present them as an easy replacement for conventional resources.
- Quality varies. Open licenses say nothing about accuracy. Materials still need checking and may need updating.
- Findability is uneven. Good resources exist, but locating one that matches a syllabus can take effort.
- Support is needed. Someone must maintain and host materials. Funding models for that work are still debated.
- License conditions differ. Some licenses forbid commercial use or require adaptations to be shared under the same terms, and mixing resources with incompatible licenses can cause problems.
- Evidence on learning outcomes is mixed. Studies on openly licensed textbooks often report that students perform comparably with those using conventional books, while savings are clearer. Beyond that, claims should be read with care.
What to take from the history
The shift from MOOCs to OER illustrates a useful lesson about the word “open”: it can describe price, access, permission, or all three, and each matters differently to different people. A learner may only care that something is free to study. A teacher or institution is likely to care a great deal about whether they can adapt and keep it. Knowing which kind of openness an offer provides helps you ask for the right thing and avoid disappointment.