About OER
According to the UNESCO, “Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others”.
Creating, using, and sharing OER contributes to removing barriers to education, encourage collaborative learning, and promote educational quality worldwide. By embracing open licensing, educators and learners can co-create, personalise, and share content that meets diverse needs and contexts.
For further reading, have a look at our blog post series 23 Good Reasons to Adopt Open Education.
By default, any online resource is protected by copyright laws. To legally reuse it, users are required to ask for permission to the creator, even though the resource may be free (cost-less).
An OER is a cost-less online resource on which the creator has explicitly mention how users may reuse the resource without asking for permission, usually by using Creative Commons licences.
Creative Commons (CC) licences are a set of open licences developed in the early 2000s by the American non-profit organisation Creative Commons. They were created to offer creators a flexible alternative to traditional copyright, making it easier to share creative works online in a legally straightforward way.
These licences are based on four key conditions that determine how works can be reused and redistributed:
– Attribution (BY): the creator must be credited.
– NonCommercial (NC): the work cannot be used for commercial purposes.
– NoDerivatives (ND): modified versions cannot be shared.
– ShareAlike (SA): adaptations must be distributed under the same licence terms.
These elements can be combined to produce six main licences: CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-ND, and CC BY-NC-ND.
Additionally, Creative Commons Zero (CC0) allows creators to waive all rights entirely, placing the work in the public domain so it can be used freely without attribution or licensing conditions.
Creators choose a licence depending on how much permissions they wish to grant others. Their choice may also depend on whether the resource incorporates other openly licensed materials, in which case the original terms must be respected. Before openly sharing a work, creators must ensure they hold the necessary rights and that any reused content is properly attributed and compatible with the chosen licence.
In practice, CC licences are usually indicated in a short notice at the beginning or end of a resource. For example, unless otherwise specified, all articles published on this blog are released under a CC BY licence, as noted at the bottom of each post.
Within the Open Education movement, CC Attribution (CC BY) and CC Attribution-ShareALike (CC BY-SA) are strongly favoured because they offer the highest degree of openness. The NonCommercial (NC) condition is debated, as it may unintentionally limit access for groups such as independent educators. Similarly, NoDerivatives (ND) licences are usually considered unsuitable for OER, as the ability to adapt, translate, or contextualise materials is essential for educational purposes.
Thanks to their international recognition, flexibility, and widespread use, CC licences have become the preferred option for OER and are also central to the Open Science movement. Nevertheless, other open licences exist, such as GNU and MIT licences, which are commonly used for open-source software development.
Unfortunately, there is no single international platform that indexes all Open Educational Resources (OER). However, several dedicated search engines make it easier to discover them, such as the OER Search Index and the Mason OER Metafinder.
Beyond these search tools, you can also explore individual repositories (databases) that host OER. You can refer to the page listing the repositories of the EUniWell partners. There are also well-established international repositories such as OER Commons and MERLOT.
If you are looking for broader open content online, you can use tools like the Creative Commons search portal. Most mainstream search engines also offer filters (often in their advanced settings) that allow you to search specifically for content that can be reused or redistributed under open licences.
About this showcase
On this blog, and more generally in the activities of the Open Education working group, we often refer to OER as a concept. The aim of this showcase is to provide concrete examples of such resources. We therefore placed particular emphasis on gathering materials that cover a wide range of topics and that come in diverse formats (videos, podcasts, courses, flashcards, and more).
Together with our list of repositories and this FAQ, and in addition to the blog, the showcase supports our awareness-raising efforts around the open education landscape and the use of OER.
Finally, the working group is also planning to create an EUniWell OER portal by 2027, which will make it easier to search for and use OER across the alliance. As this future portal requires significant work, the showcase acts as an intermediate step on the way to its development.
In mid-2025, partners, through their representatives in the working group, were invited to identify OER from their institutions, with the aim of showcasing the diversity of existing resources. In September and October 2025, the working group collectively reviewed the submissions in order to curate the selection.
Note: The focus was on ensuring a wide variety of topics, formats, and approaches. The intention was not to highlight particular authors or to single out resources for exceptional quality.
Ideally, OER should be provided in open, editable file formats so that users can easily adapt, remix, and reuse them. However, in practice, many resources are still shared in formats such .pdf, .docx or .pptx (the latter two being proprietary Microsoft formats, with OpenDocument formats as the open alternative). This happens for several reasons:
– Technical limitations or habits: Many authors create materials using familiar tools like Word or PowerPoint and export them as PDF by default. They may not be aware of open formats or may lack the tools to produce them.
– Institutional practices: Some universities or departments have established workflows or templates in proprietary formats, which leads to OER being published in the same formats.
– Preservation of layout: PDF is often used to ensure the document looks the same on all devices. Authors sometimes prefer this stability, even though it reduces editability.
– Ease of sharing: Proprietary formats remain widely used and easily accessible for most users, even if they are not technically “open”.
– Partial openness: Even if the licence is open, the format may not be. This means the resource is reusable, but not always easily adaptable, which is a limitation for OER.
Shifting these practices takes time and requires awareness-raising, but the use of non-open formats should not hinder the progress of the open education movement.
In short: OER should ideally be both openly licensed and provided in open, editable formats, but the reality of institutional workflows and common tools means that this is not always the case.
A resource that carries a NoDerivatives (ND) licence is generally not considered “open”, as it does not allow the sharing of modified versions. For OER, the recommended licences are CC BY and CC BY-SA, and sometimes CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-SA (although the NC condition is debated, see the question What are the Creative Commons (CC) licences?).
We have intentionally included a few ND-licensed resources in the showcase for illustrative purposes. This reflects the common practice, where ND was historically used more frequently.
Applying an ND licence can be seen as a first step towards openness: it still allows others to freely redistribute the original resource (as long as it is unchanged). However, because it restricts adaptation, an ND-licensed resource cannot strictly be considered an OER.
Yes (in principle)*! All the resources in the showcase include an explicit open licence. Before reusing a resource, ensure that your intended use complies with the specific Creative Commons licence applied to it. (And, as a bonus, feel free to let the author know that you have used their work!)
*Note: A small number of resources are included for illustrative purposes under a NoDerivatives (ND) licence. These may be shared in thier original form, but you are not permitted to distribute modified versions
The aim of this showcase is not to host more resource than the pool selected by the editorial committe. If you are affiliated to one of the EUniWell universities, and have an OER to share, please contact Erwan Louërat (erwan.louerat[at]univ-nantes.fr), coordinator of the EUniWell Open Education task, to discuss the repositories available for your case.
