Defining Characteristics

There are many definitions of "open educational resources" available on the web, and, for the most part, they differ little in outlining the characteristics that a teaching/learning material must have in order to be considered open.

The most common definition is provided by The William and Flora Hewlitt Foundation: "OER are 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."

Wikipedia, of course, provides an illuminating overview of the OER concept as well.

A 2007 report published by UNESCO's Virtual University identifies several characteristics of ideal OER:

"The license under which an OER is released should mention precisely what is authorized in terms of adaptation and re-use.
"OER should be published in a format that everyone can open, copy and paste from, and edit content in, without needing to install proprietary software.
"To be re-usable easily, OER should be released in small chunks, or be easily seperable into smaller chunks.
"OER should be easy to search for and find. Thsi [sic] means that resources should be described using standards-compliant metadata, to enable federated searching across a variety of search tools.
"OER should be efficient (i.e. well designed and of high quality) for teaching and learning."

By far the most controversial of these characteristics is the requirement that digital materials be distributed in an open file format such as plain text or html, rather than a closed format such as Microsoft Word. Educators seeking to develop OER should keep in mind that shared materials can't be successfully adopted if they can't be opened. However, the truth is that most people do have access to software capable of opening a variety of "proprietary" file types, so many educators continue to generate and share resources using some of the more common ones.

Now that we have looked at the core principles of open resources, we'll need to look at what's out there.