Open educational resources

The definition of Open educational resources (OER) currently most often used is:

"digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research".

OER includes:

1. open source software tools to develop, use and distribute content;
2. open (learning) content;
3. open licences and other open implementation resources.

1. Open source software tools

Wikipedia explains Open source as "Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials—typically, their source code." We are talking about a piece of programming code. Since a few years open source initiatives within the e-Learning world are becoming more mature. There is a sound base of good quality open source applications which can be used. There are OS digital learning environments like Moodle or Sakai, there are OS content management systems and there are a lot more applications like OS graphic development environments.

2. Open content

Open content is a different field than open source. With open content we are talking about open educational content. We are not talking about systems or programming code, we are talking about the real content. Offered by individuals, groups of people or institutions like schools, companies or universities.
Since a few years sharing content amongst certain educational organizations is a fact. Sometimes the initiative came by a consortium of institutions, sometimes it was initiated by e.g. a professional organization.

With the attitude of the new learner and the new teacher it is easier to share content. The attitude from a knowledge domain expert is changing towards a more connected expert: you don't have to know everything but you need a good network of co-experts who can interchange knowledge with you.

3. Open licenses

One well known organization is The Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org/) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. 

Creative Commons licenses give you the ability to dictate how others may exercise your copyright rights—such as the right of others to copy your work, make derivative works or adaptations of your work, to distribute your work and/or make money from your work.

A special project from CC is OER Commons (http://oercommons.org/). OER Commons provides open educational resources for teaching and learning that are freely available on-line for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student, or self-learner.

OER Commons uses Web 2.0 features such as tags, ratings, comments, reviews, and social networking in order to create an on-line experience that engages educators in sharing their best teaching and learning practices.