3 Open Educational Resources

There are many materials available to help teachers develop their practice. Some of these are Open Educational Resources (OER).

In most countries – and in India since 1957 – the author or creator of an original work such as a book, learning resource or video is given exclusive rights to its rights and distribution, usually for a limited time. This is known as copyright and allows the author or creator to charge users for access to the work.

With the invention of the internet, it has become much easier for everyone to share content across the world and for educators to share and adapt materials. This idea of sharing resources is the basis of OER. These are resources with an open licence, where the author or creator remains as the rights-holder but chooses which rights to retain and which rights to waive (see the Creative Commons website [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]  for more details). In an OER the creator allows users to access and reproduce the materials without cost and, under certain open licences, to adapt or change the resource.

OER have been defined as:

Advocates of OER argue that they can support improvements in curricula and support teaching by giving everyone access to a much wider range of materials. This is particularly important in contexts where there are few materials or limited access to universities or other institutions of learning. But remember, just accessing OER will not bring about change; it is using the ideas in classrooms and workshops that matters, which is the theme of this MOOC.

You will find out more about OER in Activity 1.4.