eLearning Papers • www.elearningpapers.eu • 1 Nº 7 • February 2008 • ISSN 1887-1542 Open Educational Resources and Practices Dr. Sandra Schaffert and Dr. Guntram Geser Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft, Dept. EduMedia Summary In the last few years, Open Educational Resources (OER) have gained much attention. From January 2006 to December 2007 the Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS), a project co-funded by the European Commission under the eLearning Programme, explored how OER can make a difference in teaching and learning. The project aimed at promoting OER through different activities and products such as a European OER roadmap and OER tutorials. In this paper we present some results of the roadmap which provides an overview of the OER landscape and describes possible pathways towards a higher level of production, sharing and usage of OER. Moreover, the roadmap provides recommendations on required measures and actions to support decision making at the level of educational policy and institutions. The roadmap emphasises that the knowledge society demands competencies and skills that require innovative educational practices based on open sharing and the evaluation of ideas, fostering creativity and teamwork among the learners. Collaborative creation and sharing among learning communities of OER is regarded as an important catalyst of such educational innovations. The OLCOS project also developed free online tutorials for practitioners. The objective of these tutorials is supporting students and teachers in the creation, re-use and sharing of OER. To promote hands-on work, the tutorials advise on questions such as the following: How to search for OER? Which materials may be re-used and modified? How to produce and license own OER? The tutorials will be accessible and, potentially, will evolve beyond the end of the OLCOS project, because they are published on an open and successful Wiki based platform (Wikieducator.org) and can be updated by anybody. Keywords: Open Educational Resources, Open Content, Open Source, Educational Policy, Roadmap, Tutorials, collaborative creation 1 Definition and Background In the last few years Open Educational Resources (OER) gained much attention, though, an authoritatively accredited definition of such resources does not yet exist. However, at the UNESCO-IIEP Forum (2001) it was agreed that OER include Open Course Content, Open Source development tools, and Open Standards and licensing tools. (cf. The International Institute for Educational Planning/UNESCO 2001) Stephen Downes observes that “there is a great deal of debate extant concerning the definition of ‘open’ resources”. (Downes 2007a, p. 299) In the OLCOS project, Guntram Geser (2007) argued that experts who understand OER as a means of leveraging educational practices and outcomes will define OER based on the following core attributes (see also figure 1):