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OERs

In 2001 the OER movement began in earnest when MIT announced its OpenCourseWare initiative. MIT’s goal was to make all the learning materials used by their 1800 courses a­vailable via the internet, where the resources could be used and repurposed as desired by others, without charge. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, who funded the MIT project, define OERs 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. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (Hewlett Foundation n.d.)."

This is a broad definition that covers whole courses (MOOCs) as well as individual resources, textbooks and software. A key element to it is the stress on the license that permits free use and ­re-​­purposing. This again draws on the open source distinction between free as in beer and free as in speech. In order to satisfy the Hewlett definition it is not enough to simply be free (as many MOOCs are), it has to be reusable also. There are other definitions of OERs available (see Creative Commons 2013a for a comparison of these) but even if they do not explicitly mandate an open license, they all emphasise the right to reuse content.

The OpenCourseWare initiative also addressed some of the issues seen with learning objects, particularly that of sustainability, since it took existing teaching content and released it. Educators were not required to create specialist content, although making content ­available for release is not a frictionless process, since the material