Open Educational Resources are a subset of “free stuff on the internet”. Specifically, the principles of OER align with the principles of reuse and remix that are espoused by Creative Commons. OER lessons are designed to be free of charge and almost all of them are licensed under a Creative Commons license.

There are many sources of OER materials - many are created by organizations - Engage New York aimed to produce Common Core-aligned Reading and Math activities (licensed CC-BY-SA-NC), Rice University’s OpenStax project is a set of OER textbooks for college and high school (licensed CC-BY), and OpenUp is an entire curriculum licensed as CC-BY. While most OER resources are learning objects or collections of learning objects, tools like CK-12 include both the content and the tools to access, curate, remix, and modify the content.

OER can be hugely advantageous to districts, as all of the learning objects are freely available and teachers can adapt them to their needs. This eliminates the cost of textbooks and supplemental materials and allows teachers to include a wide variety of learning objects in their curriculum to meet the needs of all learners. The lack of a cost can also alleviate some equity issues that schools lacking textbook funds can face. Because the works are licensed under a Creative Commons license, teachers and districts can modify them so as to only use a part of a lesson or to include a learning object as a part of a larger lesson or activity. For this reason, the US Department of Education launched the GoOpen initiative to encourage districts and states to adopt OER as a core component of their digital content strategy.

Despite the advantages, there are still significant barriers to OER adoption. Tools are still emerging to allow teachers to find and share OER materials, though tools like MERLOT and the OER Commons. North Carolina recently launched their own version of the OER Commons, called #GoOpenNC. The platforms allow for discovery of OER in North Carolina and from third parities, and teachers can also submit activities to be shared. All of these tools allow for the OER to be rated against a rubric (in NC, they use the Quality Review Tools rubric, and in the OER Commons the Achieve rubric is used), evaluated for alignment to standards, and allow for star ratings and comments to help the best materials float to the top.

Additionally, while resources are free, there is significant work involved in curating resources and assembling them into a curriculum, making the TCO of OER adoption very high. Additionally, OER objects can vary in quality, and need to be thoroughly assessed, and may not be aligned to the curriculum, may not be accessible, and may not be coherent from one activity from one provider to the next. Therefore, districts who are adopting OER need a strategy to curate, vet, and share resources.

While open source textbooks may have a higher quality than traditional textbooks, issues of perception and reality around workload and quality remain and OER can also create a curriculum that feels disjoined. In the end, the convenience of paid materials often outweigh the flexibility of OER in a world where teacher workloads are what they are.