According to the OER Consortium, the "Open Educational Resources (OER) movement encourages the creation and reuse of free textbooks, high-quality content and open source learning systems to replace expensive and proprietary systems. " The OER movement is often inspired by an egalitarian ideal and the belief that the Internet has made universal access to high-quality education possible. The OER movement goes hand-in-hand with a relatively new type of copyright license called the "Creative Commons" license. This license allows the public ready access to work, though frequently only for noncommercial purposes. The Creative Commons license, then, is not a substitute for copyright but, according to the Creative Commons organization itself, a vehicle that works alongside copyright, enabling creators to craft copyright terms that best suit their needs.
The OER movement has generated a number of new, free textbooks that are open-sourced. But the movement is not restricted to open source textbooks. It is considerably more expansive, embracing the entire range of education materials that reside in the public domain or have been released into the public domain via Creative Commons licenses. This can, of course, include a single open source textbook, but it can also include an entire course, or portions thereof.
Project Gutenberg is an important online repository that allows a student to download ebooks for free. The Open Library begun in 2006 by Aaron Swartz and others, aims to create a web-page for each and every book ever published, and, at present, has over one million free ebooks available. The OER Commons has a wide range of free content – not necessarily in book form – for educators of all different levels, from pre-K to graduate-studies. Materials include lecture notes, lesson plans, lab-activities, and much else besides. Any educator can add materials to these and other sites.
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The OER (Open Educational Resources) movement is inspired by an egalitarian ideal and the belief that the Internet has made universal access to high-quality education possible.