Open educational resources (OER) are learning materials 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 has been widely proposed as a key component in ongoing efforts in education sectors around the world to improve access and quality, to address rising costs, to maximise public investments, and to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.
Some definitions explicitly address OER, and in terms of scope, span across activities of educational institutions as well as governments.
[14] “...we define policy as a written document that stipulates the expectations related to Open Education for an institution or country.
Its goal is to lead to the creation, increased use and/or support for improving Open Educational Resources (OER).
[18] Additional insights into the type of institutional and governmental OER policy developments can be discerned from numerous studies conducted since 2011 by International Organisations and Associations.