Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that reside in the public domain or are released with an open license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution. OER can include textbooks, videos, tests, software, and other materials used to support education. They are different from open learning in that OER focus primarily on content while open learning includes content and services. Major OER initiatives include SkillsCommons, OpenStax CNX, OER Africa, WikiEducator, and OpenCourseWare which provide open educational content and resources that can be reused and adapted for teaching and learning.

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MOUNT TABOR TRAINING COLLEGE
PATHANAPURAM
EDU-03 - Technology and Communication in Education.
ASSIGNMENT
TOPIC:
Open Educational Resources (OER)
 Meaning and Importance
 Various OER initiative

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OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OER)
Open Educational Resources (OER) are materials for students, teachers and
researchers on the web, controlled by
copyright licenses, which support the
creation, use, reuse, remixing,
dissemination and sharing of
knowledge, as well as the teaching and
learning processes in the formal and
informal education.OER are
somewhat different from open
learning, in that they are primarily
content, while open learning includes both content and educational services, such as specially
designed online materials, in-built learner support and assessment. OER cover a wide range
of online formats, including online textbooks, video recorded lectures, YouTube clips, web-
based textual materials designed for independent study, animations and simulations, digital
diagrams and graphics, some MOOCs, or even assessment materials such as tests with
automated answers. OER can also include PowerPoint slides or pdf files of lecture notes. In
order to be open educational resources, though, they must be freely available for at least
educational use.
Definitions
The idea of Open Educational Resources (OER) has numerous working definitions.
The term was first coined at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on Open Courseware and designates
"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. Open licensing is
built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant
international conventions and respects the authorship of the work".

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William and Flora Hewlett Foundation defines 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 and 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”.
The Hewlett Foundation has updated its definition:"Open Educational Resources
are 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".
The new definition explicitly states that OER can include both digital and non-digital
resources. Also, it lists several types of use that OER permit, inspired by 5R activities of
OER.
5R activities permissions were proposed by David
Wiley, which include:
 Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies
of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and
manage)
 Reuse - 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)
 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)
Users of OER are allowed to engage in any of these 5R activities, permitted by the use of an
open license.

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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".
Advantages of using OER:
 Expanded access to learning – can be accessed anywhere at anytime
 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 learning styles
 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
Various Initiatives
SkillsCommons
The US Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College
and Career Training (TAACCCT) program in 2012 under the California State University
Chancellor’s Office created a free and open online library called SkillsCommons containing
free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce
development.
OpenStax CNX
OpenStax CNX, formerly called Connexions, is a global
repository of educational content provided by volunteers. The
open source platform is provided and maintained by OpenStax,
which is based at Rice University. The collection is available free of charge, can be remixed

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and edited, and is available for download in various digital formats. OpenStax CNX contains
educational materials at all levels, from children to college students to professionals and is
organized in small modules (pages) that can be connected into larger collections (books).
Material is authored by people from all walks of life. Much content is created by university
professors, but the collection also contains very popular music content created by a part-time
music teacher.
OER Africa
OER Africa, an initiative established by the South African
Institute for Distance Education (Saide) to play a leading role in
driving the development and use of OER across all education sectors on the African
continent. The OER4Schools project focuses on the use of Open Educational Resources in
teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa.
WikiEducator
WikiEducator is an international online community
project for the collaborative development of learning materials,
which educators are free to reuse, adapt and share without
restriction. WikiEducator was launched in 2006 and is supported
by the non-profit OER. A variety of learning resources are
available on WikiEducator, direct instructional resources such as lesson plans and full
courses, as well as learning-support resources, such as individual school portals and funding
proposals. WikiEducator's stated goal is to build a thriving and sustainable global
community dedicated to the design, development and delivery of free content for learning in
realisation of a free version of the education curriculum by 2015.
China Open Resources forEducation
The China Open Resources for Education, or CORE, was a non-profit
organization that promoted closer interaction and open sharing of educational
resources between Chinese and international universities. Its website is offline since 2013.
CORE was established in November 2003 following an MIT OpenCourseWare Conference
in Beijing. CORE was a consortium of universities that began with 26 IET Educational
Foundation member universities and 44 China Radio and TV Universities, with a total

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enrolment of 5 million students. It aimed to provide Chinese universities with free and easy
access to global open educational resources and provides the framework for Chinese-
speaking universities to participate in the shared, global network of advanced courseware
with MIT and other leading universities.
OpenCourseWare
OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published
for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining
traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means of delivering
educational content. The OpenCourseWare movement started in 1999 when the University of
Tubingen in Germany published videos of lectures online.
OER Commons
OER Commons is a freely accessible online library
that allows teachers and others to search and discover OER
and other freely available instructional materials. OER
Commons, created by the Institute for the Study of
Knowledge Management in Education, was developed to serve
curriculum experts and educators in discovering OER and collaborating around the use,
evaluation, and improvement of those materials.
Conclusion
Open educational resources are somewhat different from open learning, in that they
are primarily content, while open learning includes both content and educational services,
such as specially designed online materials, in-built learner support and assessment. Despite
some of the current limitations or weaknesses of OER, their use is likely to grow, simply
because it makes no sense to create everything from scratch when good quality materials are
freely and easily available.
Reference
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources
 https://en.unesco.org/themes/building-knowledge-societies/oer
 https://www.oercommons.org/
 https://wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:About

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 https://cnx.org/
 https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm