This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION 1 UNED OER Experience: From OCW to Open UNED Salvador Ros, Senior Member, IEEE, Roberto Hernández, Senior Member, IEEE, Timothy Read, Miguel Rodr´ ıguez Artacho, Senior Member, IEEE, Rafael Pastor, Member, IEEE, and Gabriel D´ ıaz Orueta, Senior Member, IEEE Abstract—Much as happened with open software, there has been a global attitude shift in the education community toward the open sharing of educational courses and resources. As the largest public distance education university in Spain, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) has had a clear commitment to open learning and content since its very beginnings. Its open courseware (OCW) portal was started in 2006 and has received several prizes for its innovative content. During this period, the OCW materials were used to supplement standard teaching in a variety of educational applications, among them induction and competence transfer courses. These initiatives have been used as a starting point for a comprehensive open educational resource (OER) policy at UNED. Efforts to foster OER initiatives are col- lected in the project called UNED Abierta (Open UNED). UNED currently publishes its open resources in various platforms and formats, such as iTunes U, MOOC, and OpenCourseWare. This paper presents UNED’s experience in OER and describes how it is tackling the new challenges in OER creation and distribution. Index Terms—Higher education, massive online open courses, open content, open courseware, open educational resources. I. INTRODUCTION L EARNING resources are an important asset both for in- dividuals and institutions. In much the same way that at- titudes toward sharing in the software community led to open software, over the last decade, attitudes in the global educa- tion community have evolved toward the open sharing of ed- ucational courses and resources [1]. The inception of the open educational resources (OER) movement was fostered by the Web 2.0 trend and the spirit of Stallman’s knowledge sharing initiative [2]. Since then, the scientific community has clarified, Manuscript received April 30, 2013; revised October 21, 2013; March 22, 2014; and May 15, 2014; accepted May 30, 2014. This work was sup- ported by the European Union projects RIPLECS (517836-LLP-1-2011-1-ES- ERASMUS-ESMO), PAC (517742-LLP-1-2011-1-BG-ERASMUS-ECUE), EMTM (2011-1-PL1-LEO05-19883), SO-CALL-ME (FFI2011-29829), MUREE (530332-TEMPUS-1-2012-1-JO-TEMPUS-JPCR), and Go-Lab (FP7-ICT-2011-8/317601); the Spanish Ministry of Science and In- novation under Project TIN2008-06083-C03/TSI and CREASE Project TIN2009-14317-C03; and the Region of Madrid under the E-Madrid Network of Excellence (S2009/TIC-1650). S. Ros, R. Hernández, and R. Pastor are with the Control and Communication Systems Department, Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED), 28040 Madrid, Spain (e-mail: sros@scc.uned.es; roberto@scc.uned.es; rpastor@scc.uned.es). T. Read and M. R. Artacho are with the Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos (LSI) Department, Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED), 28040 Madrid, Spain (e-mail: tread@lsi.uned.es; miguel@lsi.uned.es). G. Díaz Orueta is with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (IEEC) Department, Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED), 28040 Madrid, Spain (e-mail:, gdiaz@ieec.uned.es). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TE.2014.2331216 modified, and evolved the use of the term “OER” [3], [4]. As a result, educational resources have gone from being a key in- tellectual property of the competitive higher education world to being free resources on the Web; this most important freedom to share knowledge has been accomplished without any loss of quality [5]–[7]. This growth of OER can be argued to depend upon three factors: 1) standards; 2) social resource production; and 3) an e-learning model of teaching. For the first of these, e-learning standards are increasingly appearing; they use a variety of for- mats to represent various aspects of learning material [8] and allow the embedding of instructional knowledge and structure into educational resources [9]. These capabilities have evolved the educational resources shifted from a “monolithic brick” to a shareable and reusable resource that can be used individually or in combination to give a variety of resources with a wide range of granularity. Second, the emergence of social networks was a direct corol- lary to the appearance of both the social web and the social com- munities of users existing even before the advent of the World Wide Web. These communities can share and edit educational resources using standards-based editors and create modules and courses in a straightforward way. This has no comparison to the sharing or modification of educational material in the days of overhead projectors. Educators now have access to federated repositories, course editors, and hundreds of virtual learning en- vironments capable of managing courses and students. Third and finally, the e-learning approach has evolved over the last decade from a lesser educational model to an equally valid approach to higher education; virtual environments can provide a vast range of rich interactions for learning communities, reshaping the traditional view of a class with students [10], [11]. The classroom-based approach is no longer the only one available, as students combine classes with video classes and open materials found on the Web. OERs are now successful, thanks to a variety of repositories such as MERLOT, Connexions, OpenLearn, and others, whose hundreds of thou- sands of pieces of content or material represent thousands of freely available learning hours. In essence, the key value of OER revolves around the freedom to share the knowledge they contain, with relevant open licensing allowing it to be reused in different ways and forms. One of the most common definitions of OER is “digitized educational material offered freely and openly for students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research.” As with the model of free software, this definition assumes that educational resources are intended to be used freely, reused in different contexts, and also combined 0018-9359 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.