The Cape Town Declaration defines open educational resources as "openly licensed course materials, lesson plans, textbooks, games, software and other materials that support teaching and learning." It goes on to state that these resources should be "... licensed to facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone." The text in the Declaration was inspired by the definition of open educational resources established by UNESCO in 2002.

OER have the potential to transform the way scholarship is conducted and they are a logical extension of what the library community supports in the open access movement. Libraries have a role to play in open education by encouraging the creation and use of OER and helping to manage them. Open educational materials can become a valuable content for the institutional repositories.

Open Education News blog

Cape Town Open Education Declaration

Follows the model of the Budapest Open Access Initiative and was produced following a meeting convened by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation in Cape Town in September 2007. The Cape Town Declaration offers strategies for the development of open educational resources.

Connexions

A place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content.

ccLearn

ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources. Projects: OpenEd and ODEPO (Open Database of Educational Projects and Organizations) - an interactive semantic database for individuals and organizations involved in education, currently, ODEPO includes more than 1,000 sites affiliated with various organizations, the majority of which were provided to us by educational repositories involved in the creation and expansion of OER; DiscoverEd - a scalable search and discovery prototype for educational resources on the web; Inside OER - interviews featuring people, projects, and the progress they've made in open education; Licensing Portal for Educators, etc.  

UNESCO OER Community

This site was originally created by the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) as a place where members of the UNESCO OER Community can work together on questions, issues and documents.

Flat World Knowledge (FWK)

FWK is a new approach to college textbooks that offers rigorously reviewed textbooks online free of cost to students.

Intute

Web resources for education and research created by a network of UK universities and partners.

Jorum

Jorum is a free online service providing access to teaching and learning resources, for teaching and support staff in UK Further and Higher Education Institutions.

OpenLearn – free and open educational resources

OpenLearn is an open content initiative by the Open University.

MERLOT

MERLOT stands for the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education.

The Global Text Project

The Global Text Project is engaging the collective intelligence of worldwide communities in the development of current, high-quality content.

The Affordable Textbooks Campaign

The Affordable Textbooks Campaign is a coalition of Student PIRGs and Student Government Associations in the U.S. who are working to make college textbooks more affordable.

OER Commons

(Open Educational Resources) Commons is the first comprehensive open learning network where teachers and professors (from pre-K to graduate school) can access their colleagues' course materials, share their own, and collaborate on affecting today's classrooms.

OER Research

The body of work collected here represents the combined efforts of organizations worldwide.

OER Handbook

The purpose of this handbook is to provide a guide for those who are just getting started in the creation of open educational resources (OER).

What status for open? An examination of the licensing policies of open educational organizations and projects. ccLearn report to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. December 2008.