An Overview of Open Education Resources for Higher Education

Abstract

Since adopted in early 2000's, open education resources (OER) have evolved as a major source of learning materials for higher education. In general, there are four categories of OER, namely, open textbooks, open courseware, open online courses, and open-source software and tools to support teaching and learning. This paper attempts to characterize these four categories of OER with representative examples, and elaborates various commonly adopted open licensing options for OER. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.