Defining OER

Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others (definition by Hewlett Foundation).

To put it another way. OER meet these criteria in:

• Format: materials in any medium, digital or otherwise
• Conditions: that either
  • reside in the public domain or
  • have been released under an open license,
• Nature: permits its free use and re-purposing by others.

To see how others define OER, please visit What is OER by Creative Commons.

Now that we’ve had a chance to discuss the concept of OER let’s dig a bit deeper. We’ve just learned that, in order to be an OER, the resource should be either in the public domain or released with an open license.