What are open educational resources (OER)?
The University of Edinburgh’s OER Policy defines open educational resources as follows:
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. -UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (2019)
Open educational resources can take many forms including, but not limited to:
- Videos
- Images, including graphics, photographs, diagrams, etc
- Audio, including podcasts, recorded lectures, music
- Web pages
- Text documents, including Word documents, PDFs, articles, book chapters
- Open textbooks
- Wikipedia articles
- Simulations
- Data sets
- 3D models
- Xerte objects
- Reading lists
- Lesson plans
- Blogs and blog posts
Further information
Open Educational Resources, UNESCO
Open Educational Resources article on Wikipedia
What is OER? on Creative Commons Wiki
The Cape Town Open Education Declaration
Capetown +10 Ten Directions to Move the Open Education Movement Forward
Open Education and OER: A guide and call to action for policy makers, Association for Learning Technology