Open Educational Resources
Teaching, learning, and research materials released under open licences that permit free reuse, adaptation, and redistribution. The term entered international policy through UNESCO's 2002 Forum on Open Courseware and was formalised in the Recommendation on Open Educational Resources, adopted by UNESCO's General Conference on 25 November 2019.
Definition
The 2019 UNESCO Recommendation defines OER as "learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others." The five permissions — retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute — are widely cited as the operational test for whether material counts as open.
Licensing
Most OER carry Creative Commons licences. CC BY allows any use with attribution; CC BY-SA adds a share-alike requirement so derivatives stay open; CC BY-NC blocks commercial reuse; CC0 places work in the public domain. Materials released under more restrictive Creative Commons variants (NC, ND) are sometimes excluded from strict OER definitions because they limit revision or commercial use.
ELT examples
Large institutional collections sit in the OER space without always branding themselves that way. The British Council's LearnEnglish site, BBC Learning English, and the Voice of America Learning English archive all release substantial volumes of audio, video, and text material for non-commercial educational use. University-led repositories such as MIT OpenCourseWare host applied-linguistics and TESOL course materials. National OER projects in several countries publish locally produced ELT textbooks under CC licences.
Practical implications
OER lower the financial barrier to materials access, particularly in low-resource contexts where coursebook prices outrun learner means. They also make adaptation legally straightforward — the licence pre-grants what would otherwise require negotiation with a publisher. The trade-off is curation: open does not mean quality-checked, so institutions building courses from OER need their own evaluation process.
References
- UNESCO. (2019). Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). UNESCO.
- UNESCO. (2002). Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries: Final Report. UNESCO.
- Creative Commons. About CC Licenses. creativecommons.org.