Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational, digital resources (e.g., textbooks, lesson plans, videos, software) that are free to use and free of most restrictions to enable sharing--removing or reducing the need to ask, "Can I use this in class?" or "Can I share this with my students/classmates?" OER are also a particular type of open access (OA) works.
In a print-based world, it was rather expensive to circulate or otherwise share educational resources. Information would need to be printed, bound, and mailed to get from one person to another. In our online world, sharing information is so much easier. So easy in fact that many companies have had to create ways to restrict sharing and file lawsuits to stop people from sharing videos, music, and more over the internet.
Given the ease with which people can now share information, OER helps
- Reduce the costs of education for students.
- Educators dynamically design educational resources around their teaching rather than design their teaching around static materials.
- Educators and students co-create more inclusive educational resources representative of more diverse perspectives and needs.
- Differently-abled students learn and teachers teach since OER encourages adaptations that make work more usable by people of all abilities.