Open Educational Resources (OER)

The origin of Open Educational Resources (OER) is usually associated with the MIT Open Courseware (MIT OCW) project which released its first courses in 2001. However other projects, such as the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (or more famously: MERLOT, which began in 1997 building off from an NSF project conducting in 1994: "Authoring Tools and An Educational Object Economy (EOE)") actually were already working to better facilitate the sharing of lesson plans, resources, early websites, opensource software, and other learning materials. (MERLOT, n.d., Bliss & Smith, 2017; Stracke et. al. 2019).

As these and other projects began to take off, the need for an alternative to traditional copyright was identified by David Wiley (1998) who later founded Lumen Learning (Bliss & Smith, 2017; Lumen Learning, n.d.). This alternative license proposal was built upon by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred, the founders of Creative Commons, and organization which today continues to provide open license options and public domain tools that enable creators/authors to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works, and ensure proper attribution while promoting, (as MIT faculty and administration phrased it) the " ‘shared intellectual commons’ in academia" (MIT News, 2006).

The term "OER" comes from the 2002 UNESCO Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries, which defined OER as: "the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for noncommercial purposes" (UNESCO, 2002, p. 24). This definition has been revised a number of times, (most recently in 2019) to account for various mediums/formats, and the different ways that resources can be made openly available (i.e. public domain, and open licenses developed through Creative Commons) and now defines OER as "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that may be composed of copyrightable materials released under an open license, materials not protected by copyright, materials for which copyright protection has expired, or a combination of the foregoing" (UNESCO, 2019).

A core part of OER is the concept of the Creative Commons License. These licenses allow creators, instructors and students to engage with education resources in less restricting ways, permitting what David Wiley summarizes as "the 5R's":

• Retain
• Reuse
• Revise
• Remix
• Redistribute

The "5R's" allow for the widespread sharing and rapid improvement of educational materials without adding to the heavy financial burden of education (Wiley, n.d.).

Over the last two decades, many institutions and organizations have discovered, learned about, and committed to the OER and Open Education movements. Millions of resources have been created, disseminated, and improved. Repositories have been built, and search tools have been developed. Major efforts continue today to promote the use of OER to combat the high cost of education, improve representation in teaching materials, and to improve access for all learners, aligning with numerous UNESCO Sustainable Development goals (UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals, 2017).

"UNESCO believes that universal access to information through high quality education contributes to peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue. OER provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of learning and knowledge sharing as well as improve policy dialogue, knowledge-sharing and capacity-building globally" (UNESCO, 2021).

The terms "open content" and "open educational resources" describe any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms like "open source") that is either (1) in the public domain or (2) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:

1. Retain - make, own, and control a copy of the resource (e.g., download and keep your own copy)
2. Revise - edit, adapt, and modify your copy of the resource (e.g., translate into another language)
3. Remix - combine your original or revised copy of the resource with other existing material to create something new (e.g., make a mashup)
4. Reuse - use your original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource publicly (e.g., on a website, in a presentation, in a class)
5. Redistribute - share copies of your original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource with others (e.g., post a copy online or give one to a friend)

While a free and perpetual grant of the 5R permissions by means of an "open license" qualifies a creative work to be described as open content or an open educational resource, many open licenses place requirements (e.g., mandating that derivative works adopt a certain license) and restrictions (e.g., prohibiting "commercial" use) on users as a condition of the grant of the 5R permissions. The inclusion of requirements and restrictions in open licenses make open content and OER less open than they would be without these requirements and restrictions.

There is disagreement in the community about which requirements and restrictions should never, sometimes, or always be included in open licenses. For example, Creative Commons, the most important provider of open licenses for content, offers licenses that prohibit commercial use. While some in the community believe there are important use cases where the noncommercial restriction is desirable, many in the community strongly criticize and eschew the noncommercial restriction.

As another example, Wikipedia, one of the most important collections of open content, requires all derivative works to adopt a specific license - CC BY SA. MIT OpenCourseWare, another of the most important collections of open content, requires all derivative works to adopt a specific license - CC BY NC SA. While each site clearly believes that the ShareAlike requirement promotes its particular use case, the requirement makes the sites' content incompatible in an esoteric way that intelligent, well-meaning people can easily miss.

Generally speaking, while the choice by open content publishers to use licenses that include requirements and restrictions can optimize their ability to accomplish their own local goals, the choice typically harms the global goals of the broader open content community.

While open licenses provide users with legal permission to engage in the 5R activities, many open content publishers make technical choices that interfere with a user's ability to engage in those same activities. The ALMS Framework provides a way of thinking about those technical choices and understanding the degree to which they enable or impede a user's ability to engage in the 5R activities permitted by open licenses. Specifically, the ALMS Framework encourages us to ask questions in four categories:

1. Access to Editing Tools: Is the open content published in a format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that are extremely expensive (e.g., 3DS MAX)? Is the open content published in an exotic format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that run on an obscure or discontinued platform (e.g., OS/2)? Is the open content published in a format that can be revised or remixed using tools that are freely available and run on all major platforms (e.g., OpenOffice)?
2. Level of Expertise Required: Is the open content published in a format that requires a significant amount technical expertise to revise or remix (e.g., Blender)? Is the open content published in a format that requires a minimum level of technical expertise to revise or remix (e.g., Word)?
3. Meaningfully Editable: Is the open content published in a manner that makes its content essentially impossible to revise or remix (e.g., a scanned image of a handwritten document)? Is the open content published in a manner making its content easy to revise or remix (e.g., a text file)?
4. Self-Sourced: It the format preferred for consuming the open content the same format preferred for revising or remixing the open content (e.g., HTML)? Is the format preferred for consuming the open content different from the format preferred for revising or remixing the open content (e.g. Flash FLA vs SWF)?

Using the ALMS Framework as a guide, open content publishers can make technical choices that enable the greatest number of people possible to engage in the 5R activities. This is not an argument for "dumbing down" all open content to plain text. Rather it is an invitation to open content publishers to be thoughtful in the technical choices they make - whether they are publishing text, images, audio, video, simulations, or other media.

Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources was written by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.