Open Licensing & OER

By definition, OER reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license permitting free use and repurposing by others.

The most commonly used intellectual property license for OER that permits free use and re-purposing is called Creative Commons (CC) Licensing. CC licenses work with legal definitions of copyright to automatically provide usage rights pertaining to that work.

Modules 3 and 7 address Creative Commons licensing more fully, and provide information that will be helpful in choosing appropriate licensing to newly created or adapted OER.

A (Very) Brief History of Open Educational Resources

1994 - Wayne Hodgins coined the term “learning object”
1998 - David Wiley coined the phrase “open content”
2001 - Larry Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred founded Creative Commons
2001 - MIT introduced their OpenCourseWare project (Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs)
2002 - UNESCO coined the term "Open Educational Resources” (OER)
2012 - UNESCO adopted the 2012 OER Paris Declaration, an international commitment to OER
2019 - UNESCO updated their definition of OER, creating conversation within the open community about the impact of this change on the ability to reuse OER

This movement continues to gain momentum, and the community of open education practitioners continues to expand. Educators around the world are increasing their use and creation of these resources in their teaching and learning.

Explore Further

Read the following resources to learn more about the history of OER.

Bliss, T. J. and Smith, M. (2017). A brief history of open educational resources. In: Jhangiani, R S and Biswas-Diener, R. (eds.) Open: The philosophy and practices that are revolutionizing education and science. (pp. 9–27). Ubiquity Press. https://doi.org/10.5334/bbc.b

Weller, M. (2017). The battle for open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. Ubiquity Press. https://doi.org/10.5334/bam

Wiley, D. (2020, January 16). Clarifying and strengthening the 5Rs. Improving learning. https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/6271

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