The sharing of content has a long history and learning materials were being shared well before the term OER was coned in 2002. OER are teaching, learning, and research materials that are either in the public domain, or licensed in a way that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute - also called the 5 Rs of OER.
OER are an important means through which governments and educators can promote, develop and share educational materials, resources and content beyond the traditional proprietary publishing model. OER are quality educational materials that are freely and openly licensed, and are available online to anyone, anytime. OER benefits students in reducing costs for textbooks, it supports student success and retention (by ensuring every student in the course has access to course material), it innovates teaching practices (by adapting or creating OER teachers have the opportunity to customise course content, providing innovative, optimised learning experiences and environments for students), it exercises academic freedom, and enriches scholarship. Another benefit of OER is that resources are available for anyone to reuse and add value, including individual citizens, educators, scientist, public sector employees, entrepreneurs and commercial businesses.
Going back to the 5 Rs of OER, these are the actions anyone must be able to perform with an OER:
Sharing OER with Creative Commons (CC) licenses, considered a global standard for open content licenses, ensures that the OERs adhere to the 5 Rs.
Read more on CC license compatibility when combining different works with different CC licenses.
Attribution: Sharing Open Educational Resources (OER) with Creative Commons (CC) Open Licenses by Paul West, Tim Unwin and Cable Green is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
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