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Open educational resources

Open educational resources (OER)[1] 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.[2][3] The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses.[4] These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.[5][6]

Not to be confused with Open education.

The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to provide an alternative or enhanced educational paradigm.[7]

Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)

– the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

Reuse

Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

[21]

Open educational resources (OER) are part of a "range of processes"[8] employed by researchers and educators to broaden access to scholarly and creative conversations.[8][9][10][11] Although working definitions of the term OER may vary somewhat based on the context of their use,[12] the 2019 definition provided by UNESCO provides shared language useful for shaping an understanding of the characteristics of OER.[13] 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."[13]


While collaboration, sharing, and openness have "been an ongoing feature of educational" and research practices "past and present",[8] the term "OER" was first coined to describe associated resources at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on Open Courseware,[14] which determined that "Open Educational Resources (OER) 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."[15]


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."[16] 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.[17][18] 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",[19] further including the Creative Commons definition of OER as "teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) 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."[19][18]


The 5R activities/permissions mentioned in the definitions above were proposed by David Wiley, and include:[20]


Authors, creators, and communities may apply a range of licenses or descriptions such as those facilitated by Creative Commons or Local Contexts | TK Labels 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.[22][23]


The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 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".[24] (This is the definition cited by Wikipedia's sister project, Wikiversity.) By way of comparison, the Commonwealth of Learning "has adopted the widest definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) as 'materials offered freely and openly to use and adapt for teaching, learning, development and research'".[25] The WikiEducator project suggests that OER refers "to educational resources (lesson plans, quizzes, syllabi, instructional modules, simulations, etc.) that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing'.[26][27] 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.[28]


The above definitions expose some of the tensions that exist with OER:


These definitions also have common elements, namely they all:


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 (as found in the above definitions) 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,[30] 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.[31]


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.[32][33] 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.[11][34] 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.[35]


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 [36] 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 (WIPO), restrict all content under strict copyright (unless the copyright owner specifically releases it under an open license). The Creative Commons license is a widely used licensing framework internationally used for OER.[37]

History[edit]

The term "learning object" was coined in 1994 by Wayne Hodgins and quickly gained currency among educators and instructional designers, popularizing the idea that digital materials can be designed to allow easy reuse in a wide range of teaching and learning situations.[41]


The OER movement originated from developments in open and distance learning (ODL) and in the wider context of a culture of open knowledge, open source, free sharing and peer collaboration, which emerged in the late 20th century.[41][6] OER and Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), for instance, have many aspects in common,[42][43] a connection first established in 1998 by David Wiley[44] who coined the term "open content" and introduced the concept by analogy with open source.[45] Richard Baraniuk made the same connection independently in 1999 with the founding of the first global OER initiative, Connexions (now called OpenStax CNX).[46]


The MIT OpenCourseWare project is credited for having sparked a global Open Educational Resources Movement after announcing in 2001 that it was going to put MIT's entire course catalog online and launching this project in 2002.[47] Other contemporaneous OER projects include Connexions, which was launched by Richard Baraniuk in 1999 and showcased with MIT OpenCourseWare at the launch of the Creative Commons open licenses in 2002,[48] and the NROC Project, launched by Gary W. Lopez in 2003 that developed the HippoCampus OER site[49] and EdReady personalized learning platform.[50] Following an MIT OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing, the China Open Resources for Education (CORE) was established in November 2003. CORE's goal was to provide these resources to hundreds of universities in China.[51] In a first manifestation of this movement, MIT entered a partnership with Utah State University, where assistant professor of instructional technology David Wiley set up a distributed peer support network for the OCW's content through voluntary, self-organizing communities of interest.[52] The community college system was also an early participant in the movement. In 2004, the Sofia project[53] was launched by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District with funding support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Content for eight community-college level courses was provided online for free, in what was termed an "open content initiative."


The term "open educational resources" was first adopted at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries.[33]


In 2005 OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) launched a 20-month study to analyse and map the scale and scope of initiatives regarding "open educational resources" in terms of their purpose, content, and funding.[54] The report "Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources",[55] published in May 2007, is the main output of the project, which involved a number of expert meetings in 2006.[56]


In September 2007, the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation convened a meeting in Cape Town to which thirty leading proponents of open education were invited to collaborate on the text of a manifesto. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration was released on 22 January 2008,[57] urging governments and publishers to make publicly funded educational materials available at no charge via the internet.[58][59]


The global movement for OER culminated at the 1st World OER Congress convened in Paris on 20–22 June 2012 by UNESCO, COL and other partners. The resulting Paris OER Declaration (2012) reaffirmed the shared commitment of international organizations, governments, and institutions to promoting the open licensing and free sharing of publicly funded content, the development of national policies and strategies on OER, capacity-building, and open research.[37] In 2018, the 2nd World OER Congress in Ljubljana, Slovenia, was co-organized by UNESCO and the Government of Slovenia. The 500 experts and national delegates from 111 countries adopted the Ljubljana OER Action Plan.[60] It recommends 41 actions to mainstream open-licensed resources to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 4 on "quality and lifelong education".[61]


An historical antecedent to consider is the pedagogy of artist Joseph Beuys and the founding of the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research in 1973. After co-creating with his students, in 1967, the German Student Party, Beuys was dismissed from his teaching post in 1972 at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The institution did not approve of the fact that he permitted 50 students who had been rejected from admission to study with him. The Free University became increasingly involved in political and radical actions calling for a revitalization and restructuring of educational systems.[62][63]

Expanded access to learning – can be accessed anywhere at any time

Ability to modify course materials – can be narrowed down to topics that are relevant to course

Enhancement of course material – texts, images and videos can be used to support different approaches to learning

Rapid dissemination of information – textbooks can be put forward quicker online than publishing a textbook

Cost saving for students – all readings are available online, which saves students hundreds of dollars

[64]

Cost savings for educators - lectures and lessons plans are available online, saving educator time, effort and money, while learning new knowledge

[65]

Consolidate the foundation for more reproducible and inclusive science

[66]

Improve the quality of research produced by future generation of researchers

[66]

Removes barriers to entry and facilitate career progression by offering students to be involved in knowledge generation, enhancing diversity and representation within science.

[66]

Advantages of using OER include:[6]


Challenges of using OER include:[6]

Costs[edit]

One of the most frequently cited benefits of OER is their potential to reduce costs.[91][92][93][94][95][6] A 2023 study co-authored by the Public Interest Research Group and Michelson 20MM Foundation found that 65% of student respondents skipped out on textbooks or course materials because they were too expensive.[96] While OER seem well placed to bring down total expenditures, they are not cost-free. New OER can be assembled or simply reused or repurposed from existing open resources. This is a primary strength of OER and, as such, can produce major cost savings. OER need not be created from scratch. On the other hand, there are some costs in the assembly and adaptation process. And some OER must be created and produced originally at some time. While OER must be hosted and disseminated, and some require funding, OER development can take different routes, such as creation, adoption, adaptation and curation.[37]


Each of these models provides different cost structure and degree of cost-efficiency. Upfront costs in developing the OER infrastructure can be expensive, such as building the OER infrastructure. Butcher and Hoosen[97] noted that "a key argument put forward by those who have written about the potential benefits of OER relates to its potential for saving cost or, at least, creating significant economic efficiencies. However, to date there has been limited presentation of concrete data to back up this assertion, which reduces the effectiveness of such arguments and opens the OER movement to justified academic criticism."[37]

Institutional support[edit]

A large part of the early work on open educational resources was funded by universities and foundations such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,[47] which was the main financial supporter of open educational resources in the early years and has spent more than $110 million in the 2002 to 2010 period, of which more than $14 million went to MIT.[32] The Shuttleworth Foundation, which focuses on projects concerning collaborative content creation, has contributed as well. With the British government contributing £5.7m,[98] institutional support has also been provided by the UK funding bodies JISC[99] and HEFCE.[100] The JISC/HEFCE UKOER Programme (Phase 3 from October 2011 – October 2012)[101] was meant to build on sustainable procedure indicated in the first two phases eventually expanding in new directions that connect Open Educational Resources to other fields of work.[102][103][104]


United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is taking a leading role in "making countries aware of the potential of OER."[105] The organisation has instigated debate on how to apply OERs in practice and chaired vivid discussions on this matter through its International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP).[106] Believing that OERs can widen access to quality education, particularly when shared by many countries and higher education institutions, UNESCO also champions OERs as a means of promoting access, equity and quality in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[107] In 2012 the Paris OER Declaration[108] was approved during the 2012 OER World Congress held at UNESCO's headquarters in Paris.


As of 2022, many institutions of higher education provide a broad range of support for instructors and faculty incorporating open practices, including the adoption, modification and creation of OER.[11][109] Support provided may include financial stipends, course release, instructional design assistance, research expertise and recognition in retention, promotion and tenure.[110]

Europe – Learning Resource Exchange for schools (LRE) is a service launched by in 2004 enabling educators to find multilingual open educational resources from many different countries and providers. Currently, more than 200,000 learning resources are searchable in one portal based on language, subject, resource type and age range.

European Schoolnet

India – National Council Of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) digitized all its textbooks from 1st standard to 12th standard. The textbooks are available online for free. (CIET), a constituent Unit of NCERT, digitized more than thousand audio and video programmes. All the educational AV material developed by CIET is presently available at Sakshat Portal an initiative of Ministry of Human Resources and Development. In addition, National Repository for Open Educational Resources (NROER) houses a variety of e-content.

Central Institute of Educational Technology

US – Washington State's Project is a collection of expertly developed educational materials – including textbooks, syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments – for 81 high-enrolling college courses. All course have now been released and are providing faculty with a high-quality option that will cost students no more than $30 per course. However, a study found that very few classes were actually using these materials.[151]

Open Course Library

 – Since its launch in 2005, Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium (JOCW) has been actively promoting OER movement in Japan with more than 20 institutional members.[152]

Japan

 – The Free Curricula Centre at New World University expands the utility of existing OER textbooks by creating and curating supplemental videos to accompany them, and by converting them to the EPUB format for better display on smartphones and tablets.[153]

Dominica

is the first country to digitize a complete set of textbooks for grades 1–12.[154] Distribution is free to all.

Bangladesh

sought up to 1,000 digital learning resources in a Request For Proposals (RFP) in June 2011.[155]

Uruguay

In 2011, South Korea announced a plan to digitize all of its textbooks and to provide all students with computers and digitized textbooks by 2015.

[156]

The Free Digital Textbook Initiative at high school level,[157] initiated by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

California Learning Resources Network

The Michigan Department of Education provided $600,000 to create the Michigan Open Book Project in 2014. The initial selection of OER textbooks in history, economics, geography and social studies was issued in August 2015. There has been significant negative reaction to the materials' inaccuracies, design flaws and confusing distribution.

[158]

The 's Free High School Science Texts for South Africa[159]

Shuttleworth Foundation

Saudi Arabia had a comprehensive project in 2008 to digitize and improve the Math and Science text books in all K-12 grades.

[160]

Saudi Arabia started a project in 2011 to digitize all text books other than Math and Science.

The (ALECSO) and the U.S. State Department launched an Open Book Project in 2013, supporting "the creation of Arabic-language open educational resources (OERs)".[161]

Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization

Open Education Conference – held annually in North America (US and Canada)

[163]

OER Conference – held annually in Europe

[164]

OE Global Conference – run by Open Education Global and held annually in a variety of locations across the world

[165]

Creative Commons Global Summit – Creative Commons hosts its global summit annually and one of the main topics is Open Education and OER.

[166]

Critical discourse about OER as a movement[edit]

External discourse[edit]

The OER movement has been accused of insularity and failure to connect globally: "OERs will not be able to help countries reach their educational goals unless awareness of their power and potential can rapidly be expanded beyond the communities of interest that they have already attracted."[167]


More fundamentally, doubts were cast on the altruistic motives typically claimed by OERs. The project itself was accused of imperialism because the economic, political, and cultural preferences of highly developed countries determine the creation and dissemination of knowledge that can be used by less-developed countries and may be a self-serving imposition.[168]


To counter the general dominance of OER from the developed countries, the Research on OER for development (ROER4D) research project, aims to study how OER can be produced in the global south (developing countries) which can meet the local needs of the institutions and people. It seeks to understand in what ways, and under what circumstances can the adoption of OER address the increasing demand for accessible, relevant, high-quality and affordable post-secondary education in the Global South.


One of the sub-projects of Research on OER for development project aimed to work with teachers from government schools in Karnataka, to collaboratively create OER, including in the Kannada language spoken in the state.[169] The aim was to create a model where teachers in public education systems (who number hundreds of thousands in most countries) can collaborate to create and publish OER.

Internal discourse[edit]

Within the open educational resources movement, the concept of OER is active.[170] Consider, for example, the conceptions of gratis versus libre knowledge as found in the discourse about massive open online courses, which may offer free courses but charge for end-of-course awards or course verification certificates from commercial entities.[171][172] A second example of essentially contested ideas in OER can be found in the usage of different OER logos which can be interpreted as indicating more or less allegiance to the notion of OER as a global movement.


Stephen Downes has argued that, from a connectivist perspective, the production of OER is ironic because "in the final analysis, we cannot produce knowledge for people. Period. The people who are benefiting from these open education resource initiatives are the people who are producing these resources."[173]