4 The OER Landscape
Before we dive into open pedagogy, it’s important to know a little of the history and background of where open pedagogy comes from. In this chapter, we’ll briefly talk about Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OER), as the foundation that open pedagogy is built on.
Open Education and Open Educational Resources
The Open Education Movement stems from the need for an updated, global approach to learning and education. The global expansion of the internet has made the possibility of knowledge sharing and access to information easier and more affordable than ever before, but it is still not a perfect system. Open Education seeks to remedy this by providing resources that promote increased access to education without any financial, technical, or legal barriers.[1]
The foundation of the Open Education Movement is built on Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are defined as teaching, learning, and research 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.[2] This means that OER can be any kind of educational material (like a textbook, course module, lecture slides, etc.) that anyone can copy, mix, share, keep, edit, or use – all for free! OER use open licenses (something we’ll talk more about in Chapter Six) to specify which of those six different rights and permissions apply.
As citizens of the world, open education should matter to all of us. Watch the video below for more information on why open education matters.
- SPARC. (n.d.). Open education. Accessed September 6, 2023. https://sparcopen.org/open-education/ ↵
- Creative Commons. (n.d.). Open education – Open educational resources (OER). Accessed September 6, 2023. https://creativecommons.org/about/education-oer/ ↵
The OER Landscape from The Open Pedagogy Student Toolkit Copyright © 2023 by The Open Education Network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.