Open Educational Resources: From Practice to Policy

Open Educational Resources (OER) are digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research. 

While many large OER projects have been developed over the past decade, recent years have seen local, national, and intergovernmental agencies take an interest in creating policies to support OER. The guiding principle of public access to publicly funded educational materials, first enshrined in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration in 2008, lies at the heart of these new policy developments. 

As part of the 2011 Creative Commons Global Summit, Open Society Information Program senior program manager Melissa Hagemann will host a session reviewing the basics of OER and leading discussion of policy developments in Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, Poland, and Washington State in the U.S.

The Creative Commons Global Summit is a meeting of the Creative Commons community, including  affiliates from more than 70 jurisdictions, CC staff, and a number of CC Board members. Workshops and talks of interest to the wider public are offered on the middle day of the Summit, Saturday, September 17. The event is free to attend but participants are asked to register here.