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72-599: The term "digital public good" has been in use since at least s April 2017, when Nicholas Gruen wrote Building the Public Goods of the Twenty-First Century . The concept has attracted attention as new technologies are increasingly seen as having the potential to benefit society, leading to the development of evaluation frameworks for competing projects. Some countries, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and private sector entities have identified digital technologies as

144-507: A consensus description of OER (as found in the above definitions) is whether there should be explicit emphasis placed on specific technologies . For example, a video can be openly licensed and freely used without being a streaming video. A book can be openly licensed and freely used without being an electronic document. This technologically driven tension is deeply bound up with the discourse of open-source licensing . For more, see Licensing and Types of OER later in this article. There

216-443: A diploma from a degree granting accredited institution . However, many degree granting institutions have intentionally embraced the use of OER for research, teaching and learning, seeing their use and creation as in aligning with academic or institutional mission statements. In open education , there is an emerging effort by some accredited institutions to offer free certifications, or achievement badges, to document and acknowledge

288-458: A global discussion on how stakeholders could collaborate more effectively to harness the potential of digital technologies for improving human well-being. Recommendation 1B of the report suggests "that a broad, multi-stakeholder alliance, involving the UN, create a platform for sharing digital public goods, engaging talent and pooling data sets, in a manner that respects privacy, in areas related to attaining

360-440: A great medium for the provision of global public goods, where they become global digital public goods. Once produced in their digital form, global public goods are essentially costless to replicate and make available to all, under the assumption that users have Internet connectivity to access these goods. In a World Bank blog post, its international importance for disaster risk management is described as: Digital public goods have

432-825: A means of promoting access, equity and quality in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . In 2012 the Paris OER Declaration was approved during the 2012 OER World Congress held at UNESCO's headquarters in Paris. As of 2022, many institutions of higher education provide a broad range of support for instructors and faculty incorporating open practices, including the adoption, modification and creation of OER. Support provided may include financial stipends, course release, instructional design assistance, research expertise and recognition in retention, promotion and tenure. Manowaluilou (2020) conducted research on

504-703: A partnership with Utah State University , where assistant professor of instructional technology David Wiley set up a distributed peer support network for the OCW's content through voluntary, self-organizing communities of interest. The community college system was also an early participant in the movement. In 2004, the Sofia project was launched by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District with funding support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation . Content for eight community-college level courses

576-522: A result of the work of Creative Commons , a non-profit organization that provides ready-made licensing agreements that are less restrictive than the "all rights reserved" terms of standard international copyright. These new options have become a "critical infrastructure service for the OER movement." Another license, typically used by developers of OER software, is the GNU General Public License from

648-574: A result, OER is often classified as a digital public good. OER has contributed to reducing the costs of accessing learning materials in schools and higher education institutions in various countries. In India, the Ministry of Education has supported the development of the Indian Government's DIKSHA Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA) OER portal, which enables teachers to upload and download materials for teaching and learning. OER itself

720-425: A revitalization and restructuring of educational systems. Advantages of using OER include: Challenges of using OER include: Open educational resources often involve issues relating to intellectual property rights. Traditional commercial educational materials, such as textbooks, are protected under conventional copyright terms. However, alternative and more flexible licensing options have become available as

792-597: A tool for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This application of public goods in digital platforms has led to the use of the term "digital public goods". Various international agencies, including UNICEF and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) , are investigating digital public goods as a possible approach to enhancing digital inclusion, particularly for children in emerging economies. A digital public good

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864-541: Is a primary strength of OER and, as such, can produce major cost savings. OER need not be created from scratch. On the other hand, there are some costs in the assembly and adaptation process. And some OER must be created and produced originally at some time. While OER must be hosted and disseminated, and some require funding, OER development can take different routes, such as creation, adoption, adaptation and curation. Each of these models provides different cost structure and degree of cost-efficiency. Upfront costs in developing

936-421: Is also a tension between entities which find value in quantifying usage of OER and those which see such metrics as themselves being irrelevant to free and open resources. Those requiring metrics associated with OER are often those with economic investment in the technologies needed to access or provide electronic OER, those with economic interests potentially threatened by OER, or those requiring justification for

1008-525: Is an inherent characteristic of digital resources within the digital commons . Digital public goods are noted to share certain traits with traditional public goods including non-rivalry and non-excludability . This 2019 Wikimania submission discusses how the concept of a public good has evolved into that of a digital public good: A public good is a good that is both non-excludable (no one can be prevented from consuming this good) and non-rivalrous (the consumption of this good by anyone does not reduce

1080-569: Is created using editing and authoring software applications. The Commonwealth of Learning , an intergovernmental institution of the Commonwealth, has promoted the use of FOSS editors to create OER. It has also supported IT for Change in developing the Teachers' toolkit for creating and re-purposing OER using FOSS . This approach involves using one digital public good FOSS to expand another digital public good (OER). Digital public goods, as defined by

1152-470: Is credited for having sparked a global Open Educational Resources Movement after announcing in 2001 that it was going to put MIT 's entire course catalog online and launching this project in 2002. Other contemporaneous OER projects include Connexions , which was launched by Richard Baraniuk in 1999 and showcased with MIT OpenCourseWare at the launch of the Creative Commons open licenses in 2002, and

1224-876: Is defined by the UN Secretary-General ’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, as: " open source software , open data , open AI models , open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the SDGs." Public goods are generally understood as resources that are owned or provided for public use, such as a public clean water system. Digital Public Goods, however, differ from physical public goods in that they are not constrained by scarcity or resource depletion . Because they are digital, they can be stored, copied, and distributed indefinitely without being depleted, and often at minimal cost. Some proponents of digital public goods argue that abundance, rather than scarcity,

1296-594: Is often cited as an example of a digital public good. Another example is DHIS2 , an open source health management system. Free and open-source software (FOSS) is also frequently identified as a digital public good. Because FOSS is licensed to be shared freely, modified, and redistributed, it is available in a manner consistent with the principles of digital public goods. Open educational resources , which are designed to be freely re-used, revised, and shared under their copyright terms, are another example often associated with digital public goods. The original motivation of

1368-467: Is often motivated by a desire to provide an alternative or enhanced educational paradigm . Open educational resources (OER) are part of a "range of processes" employed by researchers and educators to broaden access to scholarly and creative conversations. Although working definitions of the term OER may vary somewhat based on the context of their use, the 2019 definition provided by UNESCO provides shared language useful for shaping an understanding of

1440-433: Is taking a leading role in "making countries aware of the potential of OER." The organisation has instigated debate on how to apply OERs in practice and chaired vivid discussions on this matter through its International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP). Believing that OERs can widen access to quality education, particularly when shared by many countries and higher education institutions, UNESCO also champions OERs as

1512-726: Is the 2007 report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation which defined OER 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 or 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." The Foundation later updated its definition to describe OER as "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in

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1584-679: Is the main output of the project, which involved a number of expert meetings in 2006. In September 2007, the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation convened a meeting in Cape Town to which thirty leading proponents of open education were invited to collaborate on the text of a manifesto. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration was released on 22 January 2008, urging governments and publishers to make publicly funded educational materials available at no charge via

1656-754: Is the pedagogy of artist Joseph Beuys and the founding of the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research in 1973. After co-creating with his students, in 1967, the German Student Party, Beuys was dismissed from his teaching post in 1972 at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The institution did not approve of the fact that he permitted 50 students who had been rejected from admission to study with him. The Free University became increasingly involved in political and radical actions calling for

1728-583: The CK-12 Foundation Curriculum Materials License. The CK-12 Foundation itself also provides—online—a suite of open educational content, typically under that license. The Pressbooks Directory is a free, searchable catalog that includes over 7,200 open access books published by 190 organizations and networks using Pressbooks. The B.C. Open Collection by BCcampus is a curated selection of OER that includes courses and textbooks that must meet quality criteria for it to be added to

1800-710: The Commonwealth of Learning "has adopted the widest definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) as 'materials offered freely and openly to use and adapt for teaching, learning, development and research ' ". The WikiEducator project suggests that OER refers "to educational resources (lesson plans, quizzes, syllabi, instructional modules, simulations, etc.) that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing'. Institutions emphasizing recognition of work with open educational resources in faculty promotion and tenure emphasize their use in research, scholarly and creative works as well. The above definitions expose some of

1872-747: The free and open-source software (FOSS) community. Open licensing allows uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free online courses available to anyone who wants to enroll. MOOCs offer a wide range of courses in many different subjects to allow people to learn in an affordable and easy manner. Types of open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, learning objects , open textbooks , openly licensed (often streamed) videos, tests, software, and other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. OER may be freely and openly available static resources, dynamic resources which change over time in

1944-472: The free software movement was political, aiming to preserve the freedom for all to study, copy, modify, and re-distribute software and code. Given the negligible marginal costs of duplicating software, free and open-source software (FOSS) is often considered a digital public good. FOSS has facilitated the wider dissemination of software in society. Since FOSS applications can be customized, users can add local language interfaces (localization), thereby expanding

2016-573: The 2nd World OER Congress in Ljubljana, Slovenia, was co-organized by UNESCO and the Government of Slovenia. The 500 experts and national delegates from 111 countries adopted the Ljubljana OER Action Plan. It recommends 41 actions to mainstream open-licensed resources to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 4 on "quality and lifelong education". An historical antecedent to consider

2088-480: The 5R activities or other collaborative research, creative and scholarly practices. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines OER as: "digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use, and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licences". By way of comparison,

2160-477: The 5R activities – retaining, remixing, revising, reusing and redistributing the resources." The 5R activities/permissions mentioned in the definitions above were proposed by David Wiley , and include: Authors, creators, and communities may apply a range of licenses or descriptions such as those facilitated by Creative Commons or Local Contexts | TK Labels to their work to communicate to what extent they intend for downstream users to engage in

2232-607: The 5R permissions enabled by the use of open licenses. One of the most frequently cited benefits of OER is their potential to reduce costs. A 2023 study co-authored by the Public Interest Research Group and Michelson 20MM Foundation found that 65% of student respondents skipped out on textbooks or course materials because they were too expensive. While OER seem well placed to bring down total expenditures, they are not cost-free. New OER can be assembled or simply reused or repurposed from existing open resources. This

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2304-567: The British government contributing £5.7m, institutional support has also been provided by the UK funding bodies JISC and HEFCE . The JISC/HEFCE UKOER Programme (Phase 3 from October 2011 – October 2012) was meant to build on sustainable procedure indicated in the first two phases eventually expanding in new directions that connect Open Educational Resources to other fields of work. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

2376-529: The COUP framework have also been used internationally (e.g. Pandra & Santosh, 2017; Afolabi, 2017 ), although contexts and OER use types vary across countries. The COUP Framework explores: Cost: the impact of OER adoption on cost reduction Outcomes: the impact of OER adoption/use on student learning Usage: the impact of and practices around customization of OER Perceptions: faculty's and students' perceptions of OER Studies continue to emerge which investigate

2448-562: The Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) have enacted research responding to critiques of open education research as "under-theorized" and exploring the role of OER as well as open practices and processes in "embracing and foregrounding diversity, inclusion and equity." As part of the Open Education Group, Hilton (2016, 2019 ) reviewed studies on OER with the focus on Cost, Outcomes, and Perceptions, finding that most of

2520-735: The NROC Project, launched by Gary W. Lopez in 2003 that developed the HippoCampus OER site and EdReady personalized learning platform. Following an MIT OpenCourseWare conference in Beijing, the China Open Resources for Education (CORE) was established in November 2003. CORE's goal was to provide these resources to hundreds of universities in China. In a first manifestation of this movement, MIT entered

2592-412: The OER infrastructure can be expensive, such as building the OER infrastructure. Butcher and Hoosen noted that "a key argument put forward by those who have written about the potential benefits of OER relates to its potential for saving cost or, at least, creating significant economic efficiencies. However, to date there has been limited presentation of concrete data to back up this assertion, which reduces

2664-743: The SDGs". In response to this recommendation, the Governments of Norway and Sierra Leone , UNICEF and iSPIRT formally initiated the Digital Public Goods Alliance in late 2019 as a follow-up to the High-level Panel. The subsequent UN Secretary-General's Roadmap for Digital Cooperation , published in June 2020, mentions the Digital Public Goods Alliance specifically as "a multi-stake-holder initiative responding directly to

2736-546: The UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation in The Age of Digital Interdependence includes open data . Open data, especially in machine-readable formats, can be utilized by startups and enterprises to develop applications and services. This can potentially lead to interoperability on a large scale. The UNCTAD Digital Economy Report 2019 suggests that the private sector could be commissioned to build

2808-493: The Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.226 via cp1108 cp1108, Varnish XID 829588466 Upstream caches: cp1108 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Fri, 29 Nov 2024 08:45:23 GMT Open educational resources Open educational resources ( OER ) are teaching , learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for

2880-522: The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's activities supporting open education since 2002, the Foundation describes OER as "freely licensed, remixable learning resources", further including the Creative Commons definition of OER as "teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in

2952-467: The accomplishments of participants. In order for educational resources to be OER, they must have an open license or otherwise communicate willingness for iterative reuse and/or modification. Many educational resources made available on the Internet are geared to allowing online access to digitalized educational content, but the materials themselves are restrictively licensed. These restrictions may complicate

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3024-415: The availability of the software to more users in different regions and societies where those languages are spoken. Copyright law typically designates digital content as "all rights reserved" by default. The open educational resources (OER) movement has popularized the use of "copyleft" licenses, such as the Creative Commons , which allow content to be freely re-used, shared, modified, and redistributed. As

3096-416: The characteristics of OER. The 2019 UNESCO definition describes OER as "teaching, learning and research materials that make use of appropriate tools, such as open licensing, to permit their free reuse, continuous improvement and repurposing by others for educational purposes." While collaboration, sharing, and openness have "been an ongoing feature of educational" and research practices "past and present",

3168-410: The collection. The MERLOT Collection is a curated resource of free and online textbooks and other resources for use in teaching and learning. Many resources undergo an extensive peer review. OER Commons provides an extensive library of OER textbooks and resources from higher education institutions around the world, as well as an OER authoring tool called Open Author The term " learning object "

3240-535: The copyright owner specifically releases it under an open license). The Creative Commons license is a widely used licensing framework internationally used for OER. The Open Textbook Library sponsored by the University of Minnesota offers open textbooks a wide range of law, medicine, engineering, and liberal arts disciplines. OpenStax , a nonprofit educational technology initiative based at Rice University, has created openly-licensed textbooks since 2012. The project

3312-557: The costs of implementing and maintaining the infrastructure or access to the freely available OER. While a semantic distinction can be made delineating the technologies used to access and host learning content from the content itself, these technologies are generally accepted as part of the collective of open educational resources. Since OER are intended to be available for a variety of educational purposes, some organizations using OER neither award degrees nor provide academic or administrative support to students seeking college credits towards

3384-519: The course of having knowledge seekers interacting with and updating them, or a course or module with a combination of these resources. OER policies (also sometimes known as laws, regulations, strategies, guidelines, principles or tenets) are adopted by governments, institutions or organisations in support of the creation and use of open content , specifically open educational resources, and related open educational practices . The growing movement of OER has also fostered research activities on OER across

3456-499: The creation, use and repurposing of Open Educational Resources (OER) and their adaptation to the contextual setting (the Open Educational Quality Initiative ). Wiley & Hilton (2018) proposed a new term called "OER-enabled pedagogy", which is defined as "the set of teaching and learning practices that are only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions which are characteristic of OER", emphasizing

3528-586: The effectiveness of such arguments and opens the OER movement to justified academic criticism." A large part of the early work on open educational resources was funded by universities and foundations such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation , which was the main financial supporter of open educational resources in the early years and has spent more than $ 110 million in the 2002 to 2010 period, of which more than $ 14 million went to MIT . The Shuttleworth Foundation , which focuses on projects concerning collaborative content creation, has contributed as well. With

3600-408: The end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts. The development and promotion of open educational resources

3672-485: The internet. The global movement for OER culminated at the 1st World OER Congress convened in Paris on 20–22 June 2012 by UNESCO, COL and other partners. The resulting Paris OER Declaration (2012) reaffirmed the shared commitment of international organizations, governments, and institutions to promoting the open licensing and free sharing of publicly funded content, the development of national policies and strategies on OER, capacity-building, and open research. In 2018,

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3744-572: The lack of a 'go to' platform, as highlighted by the Panel in its report." The report also emphasizes the role of digital public goods in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in low- and middle-income countries and calls on all stakeholders, including the UN, to support their development and implementation. These projects have been identified as Digital Public Goods Nicholas Gruen Too Many Requests If you report this error to

3816-467: The late 20th century. OER and Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), for instance, have many aspects in common, a connection first established in 1998 by David Wiley who coined the term " open content " and introduced the concept by analogy with open source. Richard Baraniuk made the same connection independently in 1999 with the founding of the first global OER initiative, Connexions (now called OpenStax CNX ). The MIT OpenCourseWare project

3888-516: The license should be educated and make all them to do hands on session. However, the evidence quality underlying pedagogical research conducted on OER is found to be of a poor quality and requires a more rigorous design to find how it improves scientific literacy, student engagement and student attitudes towards science. OER have been used in educational contexts in a variety of ways, and researchers and practitioners have proposed different names for such practices. According to Wiley & Hilton (2018),

3960-672: The most value benefits of OER usage (Petiška, 2018) A 2018 Charles University study presents that Misplaced Pages is the most used OER for students of environmental studies (used by 95% of students) and argues educational institutions should focus their attention on it (e.g. by hosting and supporting a Wikipedian in residence ). To encourage more researchers to join in the field of OER, the Open Education Group has created an "OER Research Fellowship" program, which selects 15–30 doctoral students and early career researchers in North America (US and Canada). To date, more than 50 researchers have joined

4032-517: The necessary infrastructure for data extraction, which could then be stored in a public data fund as part of a national data commons. Another approach being explored, such as in Barcelona, involves requiring companies through public procurement contracts to provide the data they collect to governments. In mid-2019, the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation published The Age of Digital Interdependence. The report recommended advancing

4104-621: The potential to transform the way disaster risk is managed while supporting innovation and collaboration globally. A global effort is needed to advance the creation and uptake of high value digital public goods for disaster risk reduction. International organizations and governments have a leading role to play in ensuring technologies and knowledge are benefiting those who need them the most, while ensuring they do no harm. In various sectors, including information science, education, finance, and healthcare, there are technologies that may be considered digital public goods as defined above. Misplaced Pages itself

4176-549: The program and conducted research on OER. The Open University in UK has run another program aimed at supporting doctoral students researching OER from any country in the world through their GO-GN network (Global OER Graduate Network). GO-GN provides its members with funding and networking opportunities as well as research support. Currently, more than 60 students are listed as its members. At every Institute and Universities level, each and everyone Student and Research scholar should aware of open educational resources and how to Implement

4248-407: The public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions." Of note in that definition is the explicit statement that OER can include both digital and non-digital resources, as well as the inclusion of several types of use that OER permit, inspired by 5R activities of OER. In a 2022 overview of

4320-456: The quantity available to others). Extending this definition to global public goods, they become goods with benefits that extend to all countries, people, and generations and are available across national borders everywhere. Knowledge and information goods embody global public goods when provided for free (otherwise the trait of non-excludability could not be met on the basis of excluding those who cannot pay for those goods). The online world provides

4392-511: The reuse and modification considered characteristic of OER. Often, this is not intentional, as educators and researchers may lack familiarity with copyright law in their own jurisdictions, never mind internationally. International law and national laws of nearly all nations, and certainly of those who have signed onto the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), restrict all content under strict copyright (unless

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4464-487: The studies (e.g. Fischer, Hilton, Robinson, & Wiley, 2015; Lovett, Meyer, & Thille, 2008; Petrides, Jimes, Middleton-Detzner, Walling, & Wiess, 2011 ) had found that OER improve student learning while significantly reducing the cost of their educational resources (e.g. textbooks). He also found that perceptions of OER by faculty and students are generally positive (e.g. Allen & Seaman, 2014; Bliss, Hilton, Wiley, & Thanos, 2013 ). The approaches proposed in

4536-455: The tensions that exist with OER: These definitions also have common elements, namely they all: Given the diversity of users, creators and sponsors of open educational resources, it is not surprising to find a variety of use cases and requirements. For this reason, it may be as helpful to consider the differences between descriptions of open educational resources as it is to consider the descriptions themselves. One of several tensions in reaching

4608-443: The term "OER" was first coined to describe associated resources at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on Open Courseware, which determined that "Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others." Often cited

4680-626: The two popular terms used are "open pedagogy" and "open educational practices". What these two terms refer to is closely related to each other, often indistinguishable. For example, Weller (2013) defines open pedagogy as follows: "Open pedagogy makes use of this abundant, open content (such as open educational resources, videos, podcasts), but also places an emphasis on the network and the learner's connections within this". Open educational practices are defined as, for example, "a set of activities around instructional design and implementation of events and processes intended to support learning. They also include

4752-471: The usage of OER which contribute to understanding of how faculty and student use of OER (enabled by the permission given by an open license) contribute to student learning. For example, research from the Czech Republic has proved most students said they use OER as often as or more often than classical materials. Misplaced Pages is the most used resource. Availability, amount of information and easy orientation are

4824-458: The use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education, particularly focusing on their role in enhancing academic English writing. The study highlights that OER can serve as valuable supplemental resources for students, potentially alleviating the need for professors to dedicate significant time and resources to teaching writing skills. This approach may improve learning efficiency and accessibility within academic environments. SkillsCommons

4896-413: The world, becoming "a mission-driven trend within the scientific literature". Mishra et al. (2022) found topics of research into OER included "open textbook, open online course, open courseware, open-source software related to open education, and open social learning." The Open Education Group suggests sorting research into four categories, called COUP Framework, based on the focus of research. Members of

4968-457: Was coined in 1994 by Wayne Hodgins and quickly gained currency among educators and instructional designers, popularizing the idea that digital materials can be designed to allow easy reuse in a wide range of teaching and learning situations. 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

5040-693: Was developed in 2012 under the California State University Chancellor's Office and funded through the $ 2 billion U.S. Department of Labor's TAACCCT initiative. Led by Assistant Vice Chancellor, Gerard Hanley, and modeled after sister project, MERLOT , SkillsCommons open workforce development content was developed and vetted by 700 community colleges and other TAACCCT institutions across the United States. The SkillsCommons content exceeded two million downloads in September 2019 and at that time

5112-600: Was initially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation , the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Michelson Twenty Million Minds Foundation , and the Maxfield Foundation. The CNX platform was retired in 2020, when OpenStax transitioned to the use of Google Docs instead. LibreTexts is a nonprofit OER (online educational resource) project. Content from LibreTexts is made available under

5184-748: Was provided online for free, in what was termed an "open content initiative." 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. In 2005 OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) launched a 20-month study to analyse and map the scale and scope of initiatives regarding "open educational resources" in terms of their purpose, content, and funding. The report "Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources", published in May 2007,

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