Open educational resources

Open education is the education that is accessible to all, allowing people to learn and teach according to their own needs and intuition, based on trust, sharing and collaboration, using modern technologies and open educational resources.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are materials that are used for teaching and learning, made available under free Creative Commons licenses or in the public domain. You can freely use them in your work, with the right to copy, distribute and further modify them (as marked by the appropriate Creative Commons license).

The term ‘open educational resources’ was first used in July 2002 at the Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries, a UNESCO workshop on open education programs in developing countries.

In January 2008 The Cape Town Declaration on Open Education, one of the key documents defining the goals and methods of working with open educational resources, was published. The declaration was created as part of a cooperative effort by a group of dozens of NGO workers, representatives of scientific institutions and government, teachers and authors of educational materials from around the world.

In November 2019 on the 40th session, the UNESCO General Conference unanimously adopted recommendations on open educational resources. These recommendations are the only existing international standard-setting instrument in this area.
The recommendations outline five areas for action, namely:
1. developing the skills of stakeholders to create, access, reuse, adapt and redistribute OER;
2. develop policies to support OER;
3. encourage the creation of high quality, inclusive and equitable OER;
4. supporting the creation of sustainable development models for OER; and
5. promoting and strengthening international cooperation in the field of OER.

OER can be downloaded from websites dedicated to it. All links offer resources for free (although some options may be available for a fee). Examples:

Public Domain Pictures – a site with photos made available as a part of the public domain

Pixabay – strona ze zdjęciami udostępnianymi na licencji zbliżonej do CC0

Open Textbook Library – free academic books and textbooks for students and beyond

OpenStax – academic textbooks created by authors around the world

Wolne Lektury – a project of the Modern Poland Foundation; the works posted on this website can be legally viewed, listened to, downloaded to your computer free of charge, as well as shared with others and quoted

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