Pre-service Teacher Awareness of Open Educational Resources

Abstract

The concept of Open Educational Resources (OER) evolved from the integration of two movements: the open source / free software movement in the late 1990s and the introduction of the Creative Commons licensing system in 2001. UNESCO (2002) coined the term "open educational resource" (p. 6) during the 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries. While the OER movement began with a focus on technology-driven instructional materials, today open educational resources are "teaching, learning, and research materials in any mediumdigital or otherwise-that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions" (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2018). OER continue to grow in popularity, yet awareness of OER from a teacher perspective has not reached universal acceptance.