30 Open Educational Resources: History and Context

Introduction

Education is essential to advancing society. It’s how we pass down the wealth of human knowledge and equip the next generation of leaders, innovators, and citizens.

Expanding educational opportunities is more possible now than it has ever been before. Through the Internet, learners can find information instantly on virtually any topic, and teachers can share their knowledge with students on another continent almost as easily as in their own classroom. Educational materials can be disseminated to a worldwide audience at virtually no marginal cost.

However, our systems for sharing information in education have not caught up with the potential of 21st century technology. Instead, the educational materials market is held captive by legacy publishing models that actively restrict the dissemination and innovative use of resources in a world that craves educational opportunities. Largely in the U.S., textbook prices have continued to rise rapidly, leaving too many students without access to their required materials. Digital offerings from traditional publishers can come with access restrictions and expiration dates, or can be pulled from publisher libraries with no warning.

Open Educational Resources

Open Education encompasses resources, tools, and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted. While the majority of this takes place in the digital realm, it can and does occur offline as well.

The foundation of Open Education are Open Educational Resources (OER), which are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this permission is granted by use of an open license (for example, Creative Commons licenses) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere. “Open” permissions are typically defined in terms of the “5R’s”: users are free to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute these educational materials.

Introduction to Open Educational Resources

For the OER professional undertaking advocacy and managing initiatives, consider these to be your talking points.

• Textbook costs should not be a barrier to education. The price of textbooks has skyrocketed more than three times the rate of inflation for decades. College students face steep price tags that can top $200 per book, and K-12 schools use books many years out of date because they are too expensive to replace. Using OER solves this problem because the material is free online, affordable in print, and can be saved forever. Resources that would otherwise go to purchasing textbooks can be redirected toward technology, improving instruction, or reducing debt. It also places pressure on publishers due to competition.
• Students learn more when they have access to quality materials. The rapidly rising cost of textbooks in higher education has left many students without access to the materials they need to succeed. Studies show that 93% of students who use OER do as well as or better than those using traditional materials, since they have easy access to the content starting day one of the course. (See: Pelton, J. A., Carlton, K. A., Finlay, S. C., Glenn, E. J., Hawkins, D., & Lindburg, J. (2023). Student Success in Open Nebraska Courses: NU Intercampus OER Research Committee White Paper. https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/socanthfacpub/28/)
• Technology holds boundless potential to improve teaching and learning. Open Education ensures that teachers, learners, and institutions can fully explore this potential. Imagine a biology textbook that incorporates COVID-19 in the chapter about viruses, or a math tutorial that incorporates local landmarks into word problems. Imagine a lecture attended by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, or a peer-to-peer exchange between Canadian students learning Mandarin with Chinese students learning English or French. All of this and more is possible when the pathways for technology in education are fully open.
• Better education means a better future. Education is the key to advancing society’s greatest goals, from a building a strong economy to leading healthy lives. By increasing access to education and creating a platform for more effective teaching and learning, Open Education benefits us all.

History of OER

The open education movement was originally inspired by the open source community, with a focus on broadening access to information through the use of free, open content. As Bliss and Smith explain in their breakdown of the history of open education: “much of our attention focused on OER’s usefulness at providing knowledge in its original form to those who otherwise might not have access. The implicit goal was to equalize access to disadvantaged and advantaged peoples of the world – in MIT’s language, to create ‘a shared intellectual Common.’”¹

Following the rise of open education in the early 2000s, growing interest in MOOCs, open courseware, and particularly open textbooks catapulted the movement to new heights; however, there are still many instructors who have never heard of open educational resources (OER) today.²

What is an OER?

Open educational resources (OER) are openly licensed, freely available educational materials that can be modified and redistributed by users. They can include any type of educational resource, from syllabi to full courses.

• Openly-licensed: You can read about this more in the Copyright & Licensing chapter.
• Freely Available: The resources must be freely available online with no fee to access. Physical OER may be sold at a low cost to facilitate printing.
• Modifiable: The resource must be made available under an open license that allows for editing. Ideally, it should also be available in an editable format.³

The most comprehensive definition of OER available today is provided by the Hewlett Foundation: “Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.”⁴

With a definition so broad that it includes any educational material so long as it is free to access and open, it might be easier to ask, “What isn’t an OER?”

What is not an OER?

If a resource is not free or openly licensed, it cannot be described as an OER. For example, most materials accessed through your library’s subscriptions cannot be altered, remixed, or redistributed. These materials require special permission to use and therefore cannot be considered “open.” The table below explains the difference between OER and other resources often misattributed as OER.

Components of an OER

Components of OER — pre-filled data

Material Type	Openly Licensed	Freely Available	Modifiable
Open educational resources	Yes	Yes	Yes
Free online resources under all rights reserved copyright	No	Yes	No
Materials available through the University Library	No	Yes	No
Open access articles and monographs	Yes	Yes	Maybe

Note: Although some materials are free to access for a library’s users, that does not mean that they are free to access for everyone (including the library). Similarly, while some open access resources are made available under a copyright license that enables modification, this is not always the case.

OER Licensing

An open license is a vital component of an open educational resource. Because of this, you must understand how open licenses work within copyright law. The copyright status of a work determines what you can and cannot do with it. As you begin to explore OER for use in your classroom, it is important that you understand your rights over the works you create and what it means to give those rights away.

Most copyrighted works are under full, “all rights reserved” copyright. This means that they cannot be reused in any way without permission from the work’s rights holder (usually the creator). One way you can get permission to use someone else’s work is through a license, a statement, or contract that allows you to perform, display, reproduce, or adapt a copyrighted work in the circumstances specified within the license. For example, the copyright holder for a popular book might sign a license to provide a movie studio with one-time rights to use their characters in a film.

Open Licenses

All OER are made available under some type of open license, a set of authorized permissions from the rights holder of a work for all users. The most popular of these licenses are Creative Commons (CC) licenses, customizable copyright licenses that allow others to reuse, adapt, and re-publish content with few or no restrictions. CC licenses allow creators to explain in plain language how their works can be used by others.6 In addition, there are other open licenses that can be applied to educational materials. A few of these licenses are described below:

• GNU Free Documentation License: a copyleft license that grants the right to copy, redistribute, and modify a resource. It requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may be sold commercially, but the original document or source code must be made available to the user as well.⁷
• Free Art License: The FAL “grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and transform creative works without infringing the author’s rights.” It is meant to be applied to artistic works, not documents.⁸

Why Open Licenses?

Open licenses are an integral part of what makes an educational resource an OER. The adaptability and reusability of OER make it so that they are not just free to access, but also free for instructors who want to alter the materials for use in their course. For example, in the figure below, an openly licensed image has been traced to make it more readable for users.

“Adaptation in action” by Abbey Elder, licensed CC 0 1.0 Links to an external site., was adapted from “Copyrighted source to tracing Links to an external site.” by Kelvinsong, also licensed CC 0 1.0 Links to an external site.. This image was originally used to represent an improper recreation of a copyrighted work via tracing. In this example, it shows how an already open work can be legally recreated via tracing for readability.

One of the tenets of OER laid out early in the open education movement was the idea of the 5 Rs (originally the 4 Rs) introduced by David Wiley.¹¹ These five attributes lay out what it means for something to be truly “open,” as the term is used in open education. The 5 Rs include:

• Retain = the right to make, own, and control copies of the content.
• Reuse = the right to use the content in a wide range of ways
• Revise = the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
• Remix = the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new
• Redistribute = the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others

While the “redistribute” and “revise” rights are the most commonly exercised rights in open education, each of the five plays an important role in the utility of an open educational resource. For example, without the right to “remix” materials, an instructor who teaches an interdisciplinary course would not be able to combine two disparate OER into a new resource that more closely fits their needs.