What Are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any format that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license permitting free access, reuse, adaptation, and redistribution. The term was coined at a UNESCO forum in 2002 to describe the growing body of digital materials that educators were making freely available online, and it has since become the standard label for a broad category that includes textbooks, course syllabi, lecture notes, assessments, audio and video recordings, and interactive simulations. The defining legal element is not cost but permission: OER carry licenses that explicitly grant rights the default of copyright withholds.

UNESCO's Recommendation on Open Educational Resources, adopted at the 40th session of the General Conference in 2019, is the first international normative instrument in the field. It defines OER as materials under copyright released with open licenses that permit at minimum no-cost access, reuse, repurposing, adaptation, and redistribution. The Recommendation calls on member states to support OER development, update copyright frameworks, and build institutional capacity for open licensing, situating OER within the broader sustainable development goal of inclusive, equitable education.

Licensing and the Five R Permissions

Open licenses are the operational core of OER. Creative Commons licenses are the most widely used mechanism. The Creative Commons framework for OER describes five permissions, known as the 5R framework: retain (keep a copy), reuse (use in any context), revise (adapt the content), remix (combine with other materials), and redistribute (share copies and adaptations). Resources carrying a CC BY license satisfy all five permissions with only an attribution requirement, making them the most permissive and the most compatible with downstream use.

More restrictive Creative Commons variants, such as CC BY-NC (noncommercial use only) or CC BY-ND (no derivatives), place limits that constrain remix and adaptation. The OER community generally favors the more open variants because the educational value of OER grows when instructors can modify and localize materials. Resources released under CC0 or in the public domain carry no restrictions at all.

Types and Formats

OER span a wide range of format types. Open textbooks are the largest category by visibility: institutions such as OpenStax, BCcampus, and the Open Textbook Library maintain peer-reviewed open textbooks in introductory undergraduate subjects, which have been adopted by hundreds of institutions as cost-reducing replacements for commercial textbooks. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provide structured course environments, though many MOOC platforms mix open and proprietary elements; only materials explicitly licensed openly qualify as OER.

Other format categories include open courseware (complete course packages including syllabi and assignments), open simulations and laboratory exercises, and open assessments. The UNESCO guidelines for OER in higher education distinguish between open access to resources and open access to completed educational outcomes, noting that OER quality depends on the pedagogical context in which materials are embedded, not solely on their technical openness.

Applications

Open educational resources have applications in a range of fields, including:

• Higher education, replacing or supplementing commercial textbooks to reduce student costs
• K-12 schooling, providing curriculum materials to under-resourced schools and systems
• Vocational and technical training, offering reusable instructional content adaptable to local industry contexts
• International development, supporting teacher training and curriculum development in low-income countries
• Corporate and professional learning, enabling organizations to build internal training content from openly licensed foundations
• Language education, providing adaptable materials that instructors can localize for regional dialects and cultural contexts