This section provides definitions of the term Open Educational Resources (OER) as provided by different authors.

The term Open Educational Resources (OER) was first adopted at UNESCO's Forum on The Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries in 2002, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. According to this forum, OER is to refer to digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research (D'Antoni, 2006). Since then, the term has been redefined to include also the concepts of tools and implementation resources.

The director of the ccLearn initiative of the Creative Commons Ahrash Bisell describes the concept as follows: "Open Educational Resources (OER) represents the efforts of a worldwide community, empowered by the Internet, to help equalize the access to knowledge and educational opportunities throughout the world. They 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 or customization by others. It is the granting of freedoms to share, reprint, translate, combine, or adapt that makes them educationally different from those that can merely be read online for free (Bissell, 2007, p. 1).

"OER 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 or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge" (Atkins et al., 2007).

A closer look at these definitions shows that the concept of "open educational resources" is both broad and vague. A wide variety of objects and online materials can be classified as educational resources, from courses and course components, to museum collections, to open access journals and reference works. Over time the term has come to cover not only content, but also learning and content management software and content development tools, and standards and licensing tools for publishing digital resources, which allow users to adapt resources in accordance with their cultural, curricular and pedagogical requirements (OECD, 2007, p.31).