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Open Educational Resources: A Review of the Literature

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Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology

Abstract

This chapter begins by reviewing the many definitions of the term open educational resources and concludes by discussing challenges and opportunities for the approach. Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials either licensed under an open copyright license or in the public domain. Neither the term “open educational resources” nor the term “open” itself has an agreed upon definition in the literature. Research regarding open educational resources focuses on methods of producing OER, methods of sharing OER, and the benefits of OER. Significant issues relating to OER remain unresolved, including business model and discovery problems.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Dean Richard Young of the David O. McKay School of Education and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for their support of this work.

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Correspondence to David Wiley Ph.D. .

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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Wiley, D., Bliss, T.J., McEwen, M. (2014). Open Educational Resources: A Review of the Literature. In: Spector, J., Merrill, M., Elen, J., Bishop, M. (eds) Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3185-5_63

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