Open Educational Resources

Having looked at open access publishing in the previous chapter, an area where the tensions around the directions of openness are evident, this chapter continues to flesh out the central proposal that openness has been successful but now faces a battle over its future direction. In this chapter we will examine an area that provides a useful contrast to open access, namely that of open educational resources (OERs). Whereas open access sees educators attempting to wrestle control back from third- party publishers and often places the two in conflict with each other, the OER movement has largely developed from within the higher education sector. There are commercial offerings in this space, many allied to the publishers we encountered in the previous chapter, but ownership of the OER movement resides within the education sector still. One area where the type of tension seen in the previous chapter is encountered is in open access textbooks, which are addressed in a separate section below. Here OERs overlap with open access publishing. At the other end of the spectrum, there is sequencing of OERs to create a course, where there is overlap with the subject of the next chapter, MOOCs. This raises the issue of definition – what do we mean by an OER – and to answer that, we will first look at a brief history of the OER movement.