What exactly is an ’open educational resource’?
An open educational resource is teaching material released under a license that lets anyone reuse, adapt, translate, and share it for free.
A geography teacher in one city and a geography teacher in another can, this afternoon, open the exact same set of course slides, translate half of it into their own language, cut the two sections they don’t need, and hand the result to their students tomorrow morning. Neither one asks anyone’s permission. Neither one pays a fee. That isn’t a hypothetical: it’s what an open educational resource is built to allow.
A license, not just a free download
An open educational resource isn’t simply a document that happens to be free to view online. UNESCO defines it as learning, teaching, and research material, in any format, that is either in the public domain or released under an open license permitting no-cost access, reuse, adaptation, and redistribution by others. The word doing the real work in that sentence is licence. A file can sit on a public website and still forbid you from copying a single paragraph into your own handout. An open license flips that default: it tells you, in advance, exactly what you are allowed to do with the material, so you never have to write and ask.
What openness actually lets you do
Once a resource carries that kind of license, a small set of freedoms opens up at once. Reuse it as published, in a classroom, a workshop, or at the kitchen table. Adapt it: cut a chapter, swap an example, translate a sentence into another language. Remix it with other open material to build something neither original resource was on its own. Redistribute whatever you produced, under the same open terms, to the next person who needs it.
- Reuse it exactly as published, no permission required
- Adapt it: cut, reorder, or translate any part
- Remix it with other openly licensed material
- Redistribute your version to anyone else who might use it
In practice, that plays out in ordinary ways. A physics course written in one country gets translated and adapted for a classroom on another continent, with local examples swapped in for the original ones. A set of worksheets published by one teacher gets trimmed down by another for a mixed-age group. None of that requires a lawyer, an email to the original author, or a licensing fee. The permission was granted in advance, to everyone, the moment the license was attached.
Where the idea came from, and how far it has travelled
The term itself isn’t new. UNESCO coined ’open educational resources’ back in 2002, at a forum discussing how open courseware could serve countries with fewer means. It took until 25 November 2019 for the idea to gain real institutional weight: at UNESCO’s General Conference, all 193 member states unanimously adopted the Recommendation on Open Educational Resources, the first international instrument of its kind for openly licensed teaching material. The recommendation asks countries to help people learn to create and share such resources, to build supportive policies around them, and to keep access genuinely equitable, not just technically free.
An equity lever, not a hobby for enthusiasts
The reason UNESCO ties this idea to equity is straightforward. A family that cannot afford a textbook, a teacher in a school with no reprographics budget, an adult studying alone at night after work: all three depend on whether the material in front of them can legally be copied, translated, or handed to someone else. Openly licensed resources don’t close every gap in education (a license doesn’t replace a teacher, a library, or a quiet room to study in), but they remove one very real obstacle: the price tag, and the legal uncertainty that normally comes with copying anything at all.
An open license doesn’t make a resource good. It makes a good resource shareable.
None of this requires a school, a country, or a budget line to already have solved the harder problems of education. Openness is a narrower promise than that: it just guarantees that whoever finally does write a clear explanation of a tricky topic, in any language, can have that explanation reach as many classrooms and kitchen tables as possible, instead of staying locked in one.
Next time you’re assembling a lesson, a workshop, or a bit of homework help, look for the license before you look at the price. Free to view and free to reuse are two different promises, and only one of them lets you make the material genuinely yours.
Sources
- Open Educational Resources (UNESCO) (unesco.org)
- UNESCO OER Recommendation: One Step Closer to Adoption (Creative Commons) (creativecommons.org)