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ABOUT OER
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
How can education benefit by harnessing OER?

The most important reason for harnessing OER is that openly licensed educational materials have tremendous potential to contribute to improving the quality and effectiveness of education. The challenges of growing access, combined with the ongoing rollout of ICT infrastructure into educational institutions, indicates that it is becoming increasingly important for them to support, in a planned and deliberate manner, the development and improvement of curricula, ongoing programme and course design, planning of contact sessions with students, development of quality teaching and learning materials, and design of effective assessment - activities all aimed at improving the teaching and learning environment while managing the cost of this through increased use of resource based learning.

Given this, the transformative educational potential of OER revolves around three linked possibilities:
  1. Increased availability of high quality, relevant learning materials can contribute to more productive students and educators. Because OER removes restrictions around copying resources, it can reduce the cost of accessing educational materials. In many systems, royalty payments for text books and other educational materials constitute a significant proportion of the overall cost, while processes of procuring permission to use copyrighted material can also be very time-consuming and expensive.
  2. The principle of allowing adaptation of materials provides one mechanism amongst many for constructing roles for students as active participants in educational processes, who learn best by doing and creating, not by passively reading and absorbing. Content licences that encourage activity and creation by students through re-use and adaptation of that content can make a significant contribution to creating more effective learning environments.
  3. OER has potential to build capacity by providing institutions and educators access, at low or no cost, to the means of production to develop their competence in producing educational materials and carrying out the necessary instructional design to integrate such materials into high quality programmes of learning.
Deliberate openness thus acknowledges that:
  • Investment in designing effective educational environments is critically important to good education.
  • A key to productive systems is to build on common intellectual capital, rather than duplicating similar efforts.
  • All things being equal, collaboration will improve quality.
  • As education is a contextualized practice, it is important to make it easy to adapt materials imported from different settings where this is required, and this should be encouraged rather than restricted.

Taken from A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER)


MORE INFORMATION ON OER
RECENT NOTES

Why OER? Why OA? UNESCO publishes two new brochures
April 16, 2026
UNESCO has published two new brochures authored by Dr. Tel Amiel, UNESCO Chair in Open Education and Technologies for the Common Good, Universidade de Brasília. Why OER: Open Educational Resources outlines the uses and benefits of open educational resources in promoting access to quality education for all. It makes the distinction between "open" and "free", and addresses common worries and misconceptions academics might have when opening up their work as OER, including citation, control, the effort required, potential uses as training material for AI, and institutional policy. Why OA: Open Access focuses on research outputs, promoting the fair and ethical sharing of scientific knowledge as a global public resource. It compares models for open access publishing, recommending Diamond Open Access, and addresses common concerns such as the perception of quality for open access works, its potential use in training AI, and the differences between sharing research through social media and publishing it through an open license. Both brochures are available from UNESCO. ...

AEGIS-OA launches to advance sustainable Diamond Open Access publishing in Europe
March 30, 2026
AEGIS-OA (Activate European Guidance and Incentives for Sustainable Open Access publishing) launched 19-20 March 2026 as a consortium of research organisations, service providers, and National Capacity Centres aiming "to strengthen a transparent, sustainable, and high-quality open access scholarly publishing ecosystem in Europe." Its goal is to build upon the services of the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH), enhancing its discovery tools and service infrastructures, as well as broadening the scope of Diamond Open Access to include monographs and edited volumes. For more information, review their press release below or visit the European Diamond Capacity Hub . ...

Who Owns AI-Generated Content?
March 23, 2026
As a contribution to the "Sharing is a Challenge" series for OEWeek 2026 from the Unitwin Network on Open Education, the web article, Who Owns AI-Generated Content? by Rory McGreal, UNESCO/ICDE Chair in Open Educational Resources, addresses two "paralyzing concerns" regarding the use of AI-generated learning materials: the paralysis of legal uncertainty, and the crisis of trust in shared content. "This article confronts these intertwined problems directly. We move beyond generic advice to address the specific apprehensions that hinder creators. Our goal is to demystify the legal landscape, provide current information on using shared material, and rebuild the confidence needed to engage with the digital commons—not recklessly, but with informed and empowered knowledge. "Presently, a clear legal trend is emerging that strongly supports openness in education. The evolving copyright landscape for GenAI, characterized by the denial of protection for purely AI-generated works, aligns with fair use/dealing doctrines and statutory exceptions for education. This creates a novel and powerful foundation for a new class of fully accessible Open Educational Resources (OER), democratizing content creation and freeing it from traditional copyright restrictions." ...

Killed, Not Starved: Deliberate Neglect of the OERF a Failure of Institutional Duty to Open Education
January 10, 2026
In December 2025, Te Pūkenga (New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology), the sole shareholder of the Open Education Resource Foundation (OERF), made the decision to disestablish the non-profit and end its services. The roles of the New Zealand UNESCO Chair in Open Educational Resources and the Open Source Technologist supporting Open Education at Otago Polytechnic were terminated. Wayne Mackintosh describes in a detailed blog post how poor stewardship and neglect forced the self-funding OERF, responsible for several successful and award-winning initiatives including WikiEducator and the OERu, into technical insolvency. "The actions taken by the shareholder resulted in the Foundation no longer being able to continue operating as a self-funded entity, notwithstanding that it had done so for 14 years." As a result, its services, including the open online courses hosted by the OERF, are expected to wind down by mid-2026, breaking long-standing commitments to the UNESCO OER Recommendation. In a related post, Paul Bacsich provides a conversation with ChatGPT about the factors leading to the closure of the OERF ...

Diamond Dreams, Unequal Realities: The Promise and Pitfalls of No-APC Open Access
October 23, 2025
Maryam Sayab, Director of Communications at the Asian Council of Science Editors (ACSE), has written a blog post on the promises and pitfalls of publishing as a Diamond OA journal, launching a critical conversation for Open Access Week. She argues that: "... the scholarly community risks embracing a 'utopian ideal' of free publishing without grappling with the structural realities that make it viable.... The result is a paradox: in regions where the promise of diamond OA is most urgently needed to break down paywalls and amplify underrepresented scholarship, the conditions for sustaining it are least available." She asks, "... not how many journals are diamond, but how many can endure, and what we, as a global community, are willing to do to ensure they do." Sayab's full blog post and accompanying discussion are available here . International Open Access Week, Who Owns Our Knowledge, runs from October 20 to 26, 2025. ...