Introduction to Open Education, Recommendations, and Documents

What are open educational resources (OER)?

Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials for teaching and learning in any format or medium, as well as research results, data, and literary works, which are free of charge and licensed as open or are in the public domain.

OER helps increase access to education by allowing educational materials to be freely shared, adapted, and reused without infringing on copyrights.

The benefits of publishing content from teachers and researchers as OER include increasing the visibility of their teaching materials outside the higher education institution, which enhances their own visibility as well as the institution's reputation.

By publishing OER in the form of written texts, videos, audio, or other types of media, they demonstrate their own way of teaching to others, thereby contributing to openness and the sharing of knowledge.

The quality of published OER can increase because their openness to the public can bring useful comments, recommendations, revisions, and updates.

Teaching practices can also be improved by using OER (e.g., publishing, reusing) because teachers and researchers will be exposed to knowledge, practice, and teaching methods of other colleagues from different backgrounds.

Examples of OER are: curricula and programs, course materials, lessons, books and textbooks, videos, podcasts, multimedia applications, teaching papers, assessment templates, photographs, brochures, reports, research data, scientific papers, research data sets, websites, blogs, and any other resource or tool designed for teaching, learning, and research that has a visible open license.

Figure 4. Open Educational Resources