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At its core, OER denotes a very simple concept, the nature of which is first legal, but then largely economic: it describes educational resources that are openly available for use by educators and students, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or licence fees. A broad spectrum of frameworks is emerging to govern how OERs are licensed for use; some licences allow only copying while others make provision for users to adapt the resources that they use. The best known of these are the Creative Commons licences. They provide legal mechanisms to ensure that authors of work can retain acknowledgement for their work while allowing it to be shared, can seek to restrict commercial activity if they so wish, and can aim to prevent people from adapting work if appropriate (although this may be difficult to enforce in legal terms at the margins). A more detailed discussion of licensing options is presented in Appendix One.

Two dimensions of OER: The pedagogical and the digital

As the concept of OER has been discussed and explored in a growing number of educational debates, discussions, and conferences, there have been two key dimensions highlighted in papers on the topic. These are summarized in a Wikipedia article on OER, as follows:

"The OER movement originated from developments in open and distance learning (ODL) and in the wider context of a culture of open knowledge, open source, free sharing and peer collaboration, which emerged in the late 20th century."

These two dimensions – the educational and the digital – are critical to understanding the real educational potential of OER, so are worth exploring briefly. As its origins are older, this is best begun by exploring briefly the history of the concept of ODL, or distance education.

OER, distance education and resource-based learning

The growth of 'distance education' methods of delivery was a key feature of education in the 20th century, for reasons that are outlined in more detail in Appendix Two. Initially, these methods were developed as distinctly different from face-to-face education, with the unfortunate consequence that they were regarded as inferior to face-to-face educational methods. Distance education came to be seen as provision for those people denied access to face-to-face education (either because they cannot afford the latter or because circumstances demand that they study on a part-time basis). The growth of new communications technologies, however, has begun to make the notion of 'distance' difficult to interpret, while opening a great number of educationally and financially viable means of providing education. Simultaneously, awareness is growing that elements