On Open Educational Resources -- Beyond Definitions

Despite the attempts at single sentence definitions so common in the published literature, “open educational resources” is a highly context-mediated construct. However, because philanthropic and public funding agencies commonly require grant outputs to be open educational resources, the ability to quickly and clearly categorize a variety of creative works as “open educational resources” or “not open educational resources” has become critical.

Many funding agencies and programs that require OER simply require grantees to apply a Creative Commons license to their grant outputs (e.g., the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the U. S. Department of Labor, the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, etc.) in order to meet the “open educational resources” requirement...