Open Educational Resources
Open Education Resources are freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes.
"Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge."
OER are resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.
The most commonly used intellectual property license for OER that permits free use and re-purposing is called Creative Commons Licensing. Creative Commons licenses work with legal definitions of copyright to automatically provide usage rights pertaining to that work.
The model of course material distribution and selection is at an inflection point.