Source: Wikipedia

Open educational resources (OER) are an Internet empowered worldwide community effort to create an education commons.

The term "open educational resources" was first adopted at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute. Open educational resources include:

• Learning content: full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
• Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities.
• Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.

In June 2007, educators at the iCommons iSummit in Dubrovnik joined the open movement worldwide to showcase emerging open education initiatives and to explore ways to better create, share and evolve open educational materials.

In September 2006, the Third Annual Open Education Conference (Community, Culture and Content) was held in Logan, Utah. The last conference was held on September 24-27, 2007 in Logan, Utah.

From 24 October to 2 December 2005 the UNESCO on-line Forum Open course content for higher education took place.