Millions of educational resources are available to freely use, and they are of all kinds: full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and many other tools, materials and techniques to support access to knowledge.

Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others (definition by Hewlett Foundation).

To put it another way. OER meet these criteria in:

Format: materials in any medium, digital or otherwise
Conditions: that either
- reside in the public domain or
- have been released under an open license,
Nature: permits its free use and re-purposing by others.

To see how others define OER, visit What is OER by Creative Commons; to read more about open licenses, visit Open license by Creative Commons.

Related content

Creative Commons Licenses

Licensing your work

Finding OER

Public Domain

The above text (and the following content-pages relating to OER) is adapted from Open Washington's self-paced workshop How to Use Open Educational Resources (http://www.openwa.org/), and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.