Open educational resources (OER) in educational policy and practice

This chapter introduces OER in the context of educational policy and practice. In the first section it compares and contrasts OER to other commonly discussed innovations in education: learning objects, digital learning materials, open data, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and open education. It then goes on to explain how OER provide a special type of innovation potential capable of supporting new forms of teaching and learning. In contrast to other analyses of OER, this report takes the view that OER should be considered in the context of key challenges for educational systems today. Six key educational challenges are therefore identified and the possible contribution of OER to solving them briefly sketched.