UNESCO has defined OERs as:

"Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation"

( https://en.unesco.org/themes/building-knowledge-societies/oer )

This contrasts with commercially published/licensed materials which usually have strong legal constraints that do not allow copying, sharing, or editing and adapting. In some jurisdictions there are allowances for educational use which can permit limited copying of a portion of a book for use within a formal class context. In general, though, publishers are protective of their intellectual property and would certainly be litigious with regards any attempts to distribute their materials feely online.

This is a great pity, in that one of the great promises of the internet and the web was the ‘democratisation of knowledge’ - the idea that anyone could access the world’s knowledge freely, wherever or whoever they are. However, this was naive since much of the world’s knowledge, in the form of books and journal articles, is subject to copyright and this constrained the extent to which digitisation was permitted. So, nowadays, we do indeed have online access to any book or article we wish, but only if we pay for a subscription or ‘per view’. For many individuals and institutions these charges for access can be prohibitive. Indeed, university libraries are struggling with pressures on their budgets arising from subscriptions for research journals, in addition to textbooks.

However, there has long been interest in providing free resources, particularly for education, and many major projects and initiatives have supported growth in ‘open publishing’. Related to this, Wikipedia is an interesting example of an open community which works towards its aim of being an unbiased, trustworthy encyclopedia; its reputation for accuracy having substantially improved since the early days in which editing and posting were more open to fabrications and abuse. Once banned by teachers, it is more typically seen nowadays as a reasonable starting point for finding out about a topic, although the extent and depth of its coverage varies considerably depending on which language version is being used.

The price of knowledge?

A more formal, or traditional, approach can be seen in the Open Textbooks community, where individual institutions, consortia, or professional associations have collaborated to develop fully shareable key texts in a number of subjects. If we consider university textbooks (particularly for popular, large enrolment subjects with a fairly standard curriculum) from established publishers, the emphasis is placed on quality in terms of commissioning established experts in the field as authors and reviewers, often alongside the production of high quality graphics and ancillary resources (eg slide decks, quiz questions, solutions, video clips, etc). Major open textbook projects, such as OpenStax, aim to do the same, particularly with regards peer-review and ensuring that the published works are of a high standard. Their books are distributed digitally but can also be printed on demand for the cost of printing alone. In the case of the US, in particular, this has been a key response to the extensive price inflation associated with college/university textbooks, where textbook price inflation has been disproportionately high (particularly in STEM disciplines which have a traditional dependence on standard textbooks)

*Some examples of Open Textbook projects*
OpenStax	US based, major project to provide fully open alternatives for large enrolment subject areas	https://openstax.org/.
Open AGH e-texbooks	Texts and coursebooks written by academic staff at AGH university, Krakow, Poland	https://epodreczniki.open.agh.edu.pl/
Open Textbook Library	Coordinated by the University of Minnesota on behalf of the Open Education Network	https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/
Athabasca University Press	Canadian University's open publishing collection	https://www.aupress.ca/
European Network of Open Education Librarians	Professional network promoting OERs and open texts in Europe	https://sparceurope.org/what-we-do/open-education/enoel/

Beyond the book

Open publishing and free educational materials is not restricted to books and text alone, indeed much of the impetus driving the community has been the parallel with Open Source Software with many educational institutions being not only users of such tools but also originators, sharing simulations, data-processing, and research as well as educational software.

Digital technologies have empowered users to design, produce, and edit the full range of available media types including text, images (photographic or otherwise), diagrams and other graphics, audio recordings and podcasts, video recordings, animation, and augmented or virtual reality. Many simple tools are available, some at high cost (and increasingly via a subscription/rental model) and used in professional production contexts, but others available under free or open licences. Similarly, there are also repositories and collections of materials and some search engines/tools allow identification of open licensed content (e.g. photographs that can be used without licence costs from unsplash.com - although take care with this source since it now also shares licensed content in its first responses to any subject search - pay close attention to the terms of any particular images that you might be interested in using).

Many teachers and academics who feel reasonably confident in their basic digital skills are also interested in producing interactive, multimedia learning materials and although there are many products on the market there are also open tools such as H5P which are popular in the education sector and have a community of developers, users, and content contributors. [H5P also has a commercial operation, H5P.com (recently bought by D2L a private LMS/VLE company), so once again, it is important to pay close attention to which version is being used.]

H5P content hub

H5P's 'content hub' showing some of the large range of interaction types available using the tool and providing access to content produced and shared by other members of the user community.

Adaptation and mixing

David Wiley (an expert in the field of open learning) has outlined the '5Rs' which he says characterise open educational resources:

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)

Being able to do this requires that the materials are made available in appropriate file formats, rather than only accessible using proprietary systems. For some media types, the standards are fairly well established even if originally from proprietary systems (such as .doc, .ppt, etc) and it is easy to edit and remix content. In other cases, particularly for multimedia training materials, there have been attempts to establish international standards that enable content to be re-used in different platforms and websites. One such example is known as SCORM packages, but whilst these are recognised in some parts of the elearning sector and all LMS/VLEs can embed SCORM packages, their editing is non-trivial and usually needs the original source files. We mention these here, as you may come across such content when searching.

For many years, there were major projects to develop repositories of 'open' digital learning materials in order to promote sharing. However, many of these projects have now stopped being supported or are no longer accessible, due to changes in funding, the long-term costs of maintenance and upgrading, and the diversity of materials released by institutions and directly accessible on the web. For the newcomer, looking for content, this means that the situation can be a little more frustrating than it once was, but the positive aspect is that there is a lot more material available than would have been found in such repositories. Some of the useful sources for searching for content are listed in the table, and there is also an attempt to sustain a world 'OER map' listing projects as well as resources, though again the challenge is ensuring that such is kept up to date (many of newer projects are not included) and there are many content producers not aware of initiatives like this and so can't be found in the listings. A useful short summary of OERs in Europe can be found in this book chapter (openly licensed) by Marlies Bauhofer which contains links to projects and sources in a number of European countries and languages.

Some general sources of OERs

OER Commons	Search tools/repository	https://oercommons.org/
Europeana - Europe's digital cultural heritage	Access to millions of items from museums, galleries, and other institutions across Europe to support education and cultural exchange	https://www.europeana.eu/en
Wikimedia Commons	Large collection of materials (mainly images), the main repository for the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation	https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Una-Europa University Consortium	Additional searching suggestions and links	https://www.una-europa.eu/knowledge-hub/toolkits/oer/using-oers-how-to-guide
Project Gutenberg	Online library of free e-books and texts	https://www.gutenberg.org/
MERLOT	OER repository (US based but international contributors and subject catalogues)	https://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
MIT OpenCourseWare	An early, but continuing project to share materials developed for MIT courses	https://ocw.mit.edu/
OpenLearn	Open lessons/examples from the UK's Open University. Much of the content for these courses is openly licensed and can be repurposed	https://www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses
OpenEd	OERs from the University of Edinburgh	https://open.ed.ac.uk/
DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals	Listings of research journals which publish papers on an open access basis (some restrictions may exist in reuse)	https://doaj.org/

World OER map project

Reflection

How do you select the key textbooks, readings, online content, and other learning resources used in your course/programme? Are these simply selected independently by the teacher of each module/unit/course rather than agreed at team or departmental level? This is often the case and is considered part of the professional autonomy of an academic, but it is nonetheless useful for the whole team to be aware of the choices and materials, particularly when it comes to key materials that students need to purchase or have access to.

To what extent does the university library support these choices and is it resourced sufficiently to ensure all students can avail of the books, papers, or other learning resources they need? Is there a formal 'reading list' or book purchasing scheme managed by the library and does this integrate with your LMS/VLE for students? What are the total costs of these materials to students and to the institution in terms of purchasing or licensing?
Do your programmes currently make use of OERs or similar free learning materials and tools? Is there any existing institutional policy around OERs/open source? What would be the ownership status of materials which you or your team develop (e.g. would they automatically be the intellectual property of the institution only, shared with you, or exclusively yours)?