User:Anna Daniel/sandbox

Definition
Open educational resources (OER) policies may be defined as legislation, institutional policies, and/or funder mandates that lead to the creation, increased use, and/or support for improving OER. OER are defined as 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 and re-purposing by others. They may include: full courses, course materials, modules, learning objects, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. A policy may be defined as a principle or rule to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. OER Policies formalize and thus enable the use of OER within learning institutions.

National / state / provincial governments and education systems all play a critical role in setting policies that drive education investments, and have an interest in ensuring that public funding in education make a meaningful, cost-effective contribution to socioeconomic development. Given this role, these policy-making entities are ideally positioned to encourage or mandate recipients of public funding to produce educational resources under an open license. For example, policies relating to the introduction and adoption of OER into their jurisdictions such as openly licensed textbooks. The OER Policy Registry contains examples of existing OER policies. The Registry aims to streamline the policy-making process and improve the quality of policies, with the ultimate goal of strengthening open education worldwide.

History
In 2006, Catherine Casserly and Mike Marshall Smith wrote: “At the heart of the movement towards OER is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Worldwide Web in particular provide an opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse it.” Sharing educational resources may accomplish this goal, and open policies that require that educational resources produced with public funds be openly licensed is a necessary condition to make high quality learning materials available to everyone.

Organizations such as UNESCO have been actively promoting the concept, notably with the UNESCO World Open Educational Resources Declaration (PDF) signed in Paris on 20-22 June 2012 and which - although not a policy - may enable OER policies.