Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that are:
- Created by college and university professors
- Digital in a majority of cases
- Free to access and use
- Free to copy, share, adapt and modify, with few or no copyright restrictions (under an open licence or released to the public domain)
The last characteristic mentioned above is what differentiates OER from most copyrighted works on the Internet. There are many types of OER such as open textbooks, videos, lesson plans, interactive exercises, and tutorials.