The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation defines Open Educational Resources as

teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation 2016).

What makes OER different than other freely-available resources?

As the European Open EDU Policy Project states:

General rights for copying and repurposing are what make OER different from any other educational resources available online free of charge. Free materials and courses such as most MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) allow users only fair use rights, or rights stated in specific licenses issued by the publisher. Most of them cannot be legally copied, and users cannot create their own courses based on them or update them if a mistake has been found – not, that is, without explicit agreement from copyright owners. In the case of Open Educational Resources, all users are given the above rights without needing to request permission from copyright holders (as long as they adhere to license conditions, such as attribution); the users' rights are clearly specified and easily understandable (thanks to Creative Commons licenses and their clear system). Most OER materials are published under free Creative Commons licenses or as Public Domain (Grodecka and Śliwowskithe 2014).

References

Grodecka, Karolina and Kamil Śliwowski. (2014). Open Educational Resources Mythbusting. European Open EDU Policy Project. Retrieved from http://mythbusting.oerpolicy.eu.

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (2016). Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education/open-educational-resources.