Advocacy
Every year, governments spend billions of dollars to create textbooks and learning materials for students. Today, a growing number of state, federal and international government policy leaders are exploring ways to build upon the benefits offered by OER. Open Educational Resources (OER) should be included as a core principle underpinning relevant federal and state education policies and programs. Lawmakers from Washington, D.C. to state capitals to local school boards can help solve this problem by ensuring publicly-funded educational materials are publicly accessible and sharable as OER. Decision makers can also consider making materials available for commercialization, so that entities that can add value to the base publicly available content and learning materials.
Recommendation
Open educational resources (OER) means teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or repurposing by others. OER permit educators to share, access and collaborate so they can customize and personalize content and instruction.
Educational resources funded by the government should be conditionally released under a public, standardized license that allows for their free access, redistribution, and re-purposing, or made completely and unconditionally available via placement in the public domain. Publicly funded educational materials should be open educational materials. Publicly funded educational materials should ideally be made available for commercialization to add additional value to the taxpayer’s initial investment in learning materials.
To advance the movement to provide greater public access to government-funded educational materials, visit our Learn More section to contact organizations active in OER.
