OER (open educational resources) are teaching, learning and research materials, such as textbooks, lecture notes, videos and tests, that are in the public domain or released under an open license that permits free use, adaptation and redistribution. Creative Commons licenses are the most common way to do this.
Why it matters
OER lower the cost of course materials and let teachers customize content for their students, translate it or update it. The details live in the license: some allow commercial use and changes, others forbid them. "Free to read" is not the same as open. Licensing is a form of software license thinking applied to content, and similar to open source in spirit.
Example
A textbook is published under CC BY, which allows reuse with credit. A teacher can:
- Copy it to a course site
- Remove two chapters and add local examples
- Share the adapted version, crediting the original authors and noting changes
A text under CC BY-NC could be used in a school but not sold in a commercial course.
Common mistakes
- Assuming anything found online is free to reuse.
- Dropping attribution or the license notice when adapting a work.
- Mixing materials with incompatible licenses in one remix.
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