Open Educational Resources are educational materials that are available for free, online and are either:

• Openly-licensed with one of the following 4 open licenses (which allow others to edit, remix and redistribute these materials) created by the Creative Commons organization:
  • CC BY
  • CC BY-SA
  • CC BY-NC
  • CC BY-NC-SA

OR

• In the public domain (i.e., no longer protected by copyright, basically, now 'owned' by all us, the public)
  • Creative Commons also created a public domain dedication tool (CC0); it makes it easy for creators to dedicate their material as being in the public domain, available for all to use with no copyright restrictions at all

OER includes materials such as:

• textbooks
• assignments
• teacher guides
• recorded lectures
• quiz or exam question banks
• lab manuals
• scholarly books
• open homework generators
• curricula
• entire courses
• lesson plans

& MORE!

that can be used for teaching, learning, and research.  (Keep in mind that one can of course use OA articles and scholarly books as class readings, too, and could even use open data as part of an assignment.)

Because OER are openly-licensed, they can be altered and customized in ways that no 'all rights reserved' material ever can.

OER's unique, customizable nature can make it a game-changer in the classroom, making possible an instructional technique called 'open pedagogy / OER-enabled pedagogy'.