Authored by Madelyn Huff, UNG Press Intern
Have you ever utilized a free textbook at school? Have you ever completed coursework through a digital learning module or watched a video tutorial? If you have, you have experienced an Open Educational Resource! Open Educational Resources, or OER, are wonderful resources that can save students hundreds of dollars while providing education opportunities. This article will outline what exactly an Open Educational Resource is, a brief history, and how the UNG Press continues to support the development of OER.
What are Open Educational Resources?
Open Educational Resources are free and accessible “learning, research, and teaching materials” (UNESCO). OER are either a part of the public domain or are distributed using an open license, allowing users to use and alter the materials however they want to (Purdue). OER are designed to fulfill the “5 Rs”: retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute (Bliss and Smith 12). This flexibility allows users to beneficially manipulate educational materials, an opportunity that they are often not awarded with through traditional costly materials.
Textbooks, learning modules, and tutorials are only a few examples of Open Educational Resources. Lecture notes, quizzes or tests, or audio and video recordings are also materials that can be made into Open Educational Resources (Purdue). As the list of materials entering into the realm of OER expands, “financial barriers” to education are reduced, ensuring that anyone has a chance to learn (Bain).
History
This brief timeline details the creation and development of Open Educational Resources.
- 1994: The National Science Foundation provides a grant to California State University to “identify and provide access to primarily free online curriculum materials for higher education” (Bain).
- 1997: MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online) is created. This service is the first OER repository (Bain).
- 1999: MIT introduces Open Courseware, a resource service where anyone could “change, modify, or redistribute the material” (Bain).
- 1999: Richard Baraniuk at Rice University creates Connexions. This platform was web-based and served as a facilitator for “sharing open source educational content” on a global level (Bliss and Smith 10).
- 2001: Stanford University founded Creative Commons. This is the organization that develops the open licenses that OER need (Bliss and Smith 11).
- 2002: UNESCO coins the term “Open Educational Resource” (Bain). It sticks!
The history of Open Educational Resources is very much an ongoing history. Advances continue to be made, and several organizations remain impactful funders for OER progression.
UNG Press and OER
UNG Press is proud to promote Open Educational Resources. We place great value on promoting education to a continuously expanding audience. This devotion solidifies our standing as the leading OER university press in Georgia. We offer services such as peer review, copyright clearance and licensing, production and design, and more that are meant to encourage authors to pursue turning their work into an Open Educational Resource. Through collaboration and support, our partnerships with multiple committed groups like Affordable Learning Georgia, eCore, and USG further our goal to increase access to knowledge.
Final Thoughts
Open Educational Resources have come a long way since the 1994 California grant. There are still strides being taken to encourage a wider variety of university faculties to adopt OER wholeheartedly as well as implement these resources on a global scale. Open Educational Resources represent the importance of making education accessible and affordable for a global society of learners.
“At the heart of the concept of OER is freedom: freedom of access to content, freedom from cost, and freedom to use in any way.”
— Bliss and Smith 20
Works Cited
Bain, Linda. “Open Education Resources: Why Were They Developed and What Are Future Implications.” Press Books, pressbooks.pub/techcurr2023/chapter/oer/. Accessed Feb. 2026.
Bliss, T.J., and M. Smith. “A Brief History of Open Educational Resources.” Ubiquity Press, Hewlett Foundation, 2017, ubiquitypress.com/reader/chapters/pdf/10.5334/bbc.b.
“Open Educational Resources.” UNESCO, UNESCO, www.unesco.org/en/open-educational-resources. Accessed Feb. 2026.
“What Are OER?” Purdue University, Purdue University, 2025, library.pfw.edu/OER.
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