Open Education Resources (OER) are educational material and resources that the general public can freely use for teaching, learning, and research. Like Open Source Software (OSS), OER contain content that is freely reused and redistributed without the traditional restrictions imposed by copyright. OER also includes the tools used to develop, improve, and distribute this content to communities.

The Open Education 2007: Localizing and Learning conference was held at Utah State University in September. The conference focused on the ability of people to learn as simply publishing OER content online does not guarantee that it can be effectively used for learning. This theme was investigated from two perspectives. The first was from the developer perspective with the sharing of efforts to localize the educational content and make it more relevant to the people using it. The second was from the user perspective where organizations utilizing or deploying OER spoke of their experiences, challenges, and successes.

This report provides an overview of the sustainability, localization, technological, legal and interoperability issues raised at the conference. It concludes with the authors' views regarding the future direction of OERs, based on their research being conducted at Carleton University's Technology Innovation Management program.