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ABOUT OER
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
How can education benefit by harnessing OER?

The most important reason for harnessing OER is that openly licensed educational materials have tremendous potential to contribute to improving the quality and effectiveness of education. The challenges of growing access, combined with the ongoing rollout of ICT infrastructure into educational institutions, indicates that it is becoming increasingly important for them to support, in a planned and deliberate manner, the development and improvement of curricula, ongoing programme and course design, planning of contact sessions with students, development of quality teaching and learning materials, and design of effective assessment - activities all aimed at improving the teaching and learning environment while managing the cost of this through increased use of resource based learning.

Given this, the transformative educational potential of OER revolves around three linked possibilities:
  1. Increased availability of high quality, relevant learning materials can contribute to more productive students and educators. Because OER removes restrictions around copying resources, it can reduce the cost of accessing educational materials. In many systems, royalty payments for text books and other educational materials constitute a significant proportion of the overall cost, while processes of procuring permission to use copyrighted material can also be very time-consuming and expensive.
  2. The principle of allowing adaptation of materials provides one mechanism amongst many for constructing roles for students as active participants in educational processes, who learn best by doing and creating, not by passively reading and absorbing. Content licences that encourage activity and creation by students through re-use and adaptation of that content can make a significant contribution to creating more effective learning environments.
  3. OER has potential to build capacity by providing institutions and educators access, at low or no cost, to the means of production to develop their competence in producing educational materials and carrying out the necessary instructional design to integrate such materials into high quality programmes of learning.
Deliberate openness thus acknowledges that:
  • Investment in designing effective educational environments is critically important to good education.
  • A key to productive systems is to build on common intellectual capital, rather than duplicating similar efforts.
  • All things being equal, collaboration will improve quality.
  • As education is a contextualized practice, it is important to make it easy to adapt materials imported from different settings where this is required, and this should be encouraged rather than restricted.

Taken from A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER)


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RECENT NOTES

Diamond Dreams, Unequal Realities: The Promise and Pitfalls of No-APC Open Access
October 23, 2025
Maryam Sayab, Director of Communications at the Asian Council of Science Editors (ACSE), has written a blog post on the promises and pitfalls of publishing as a Diamond OA journal, launching a critical conversation for Open Access Week. She argues that: "... the scholarly community risks embracing a 'utopian ideal' of free publishing without grappling with the structural realities that make it viable.... The result is a paradox: in regions where the promise of diamond OA is most urgently needed to break down paywalls and amplify underrepresented scholarship, the conditions for sustaining it are least available." She asks, "... not how many journals are diamond, but how many can endure, and what we, as a global community, are willing to do to ensure they do." Sayab's full blog post and accompanying discussion are available here . International Open Access Week, Who Owns Our Knowledge, runs from October 20 to 26, 2025. ...

Decree On the Development, Use, and Management of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education: Vietnam
August 28, 2025
The Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam has issued a Decree on the development, use, and management of Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education in Vietnam. An unofficial English translation (for academic and reference purposes only) is now available on the OER Knowledge Cloud. From Article 1: This Decree regulates the development, evaluation, publication, sharing, use, and management of Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education in Vietnam. It establishes policies, mechanisms, and technical standards to ensure the quality of materials, openness, fair and long-term access, and effective use across the higher education system. ...

OE Week at CIDER celebrates 25 years of OA innovation
March 8, 2025
During Open Education Week 2025, CIDER hosted a special series of sessions to celebrate the 25th anniversary of The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL). Recordings of all three sessions are available. March 3: Retrospective on Open Access Publishing Rory McGreal March 5: The Evolution of Open and Distributed Learning Connie Blomgren and Terry Anderson March 7: Emerging Technologies in International Education Adnan Qayyum and Levina Yuen Download the OE Week 2025 overview . ...

UNESCO releases Dubai Declaration on Open Educational Resources
January 2, 2025
UNESCO has released its Dubai Declaration on Open Educational Resources: Digital Public Goods and Emerging Technologies for Equitable and Inclusive Access to Knowledge . from the 3rd World Open Educational Resources Congress held in Dubai, 2024. The Declaration's recommendations are: Emerging technologies, including AI, provide opportunities to advance the 2019 Recommendation. Beyond the creation of new openly licensed content, potential applications include: facilitating the detection of existing openly licensed content online; developing techniques for effective OER curation; translating OER into multiple languages; and facilitating content indexing through the recommendation of descriptive metadata. Other emerging technologies, such as decentralized and secure digital ledger systems, could potentially ensure the provenance, integrity and lawful use of OER. Legal frameworks are not up to date with technological advancements such as these. In the realm of intellectual property rights (IPR), the key to OER, this can lead to ambiguities on what constitutes legal use as well as issues regarding how exceptions and limitations to copyright law may be used even when a work is not openly licensed. Developing clear guidelines and policies that address these issues can help protect the rights of content creators, ensure proper attribution and create innovative technology spaces for the public good. The Global Digital Compact and UNESCO’s ROAM-X principles, which are rights-based, open, accessible and promote multi-stakeholder participation based on cross-cutting principles, in particular gender equity, can inform policies for OER by providing a comprehensive framework that ensures inclusivity, equity and collaboration in the development and implementation of open educational resources. These frameworks and principles, alongside the 2019 Recommendation, provide a robust foundation for developing OER. The stakeholders addressed in this document are those in the 2019 Recommendation 4. With regard to generative AI, it is important to underscore that these recommendations apply both to the inputs and outputs of large language models (LLMs). Furthermore, the principle of human-centred use of technology prevails in all recommendations. The principles of transparency and knowledge-sharing are fundamental for the implementation of these recommendations. The guidelines below aim to provide actions to harness the opportunities posed by emerging technologies, such as AI, for expanding knowledge-sharing and creation through the implementation of the 2019 Recommendation. Download the full Declaration here ...

On a Path to Open: New report on Ontario's capacity to support OEP
November 12, 2024
Brock University’s Inclusive Education Research Lab and eCampusOntario have released On a Path to Open , a new report detailing key results from a study conducted with Ontario’s publically-supported colleges, universities, and Indigenous institutes about their capacity to support open educational practices (OEP). This report begins with an overview of open education and OEP, chronicles the development and deployment of the Institutional Self-Assessment Tool, presents results from an online survey of Ontario institutions, and closes with 10 practical recommendations. The full report is available here: https://www.ecampusontario.ca/on-a-path-to-open/ ...