is encountered is in open access textbooks, which are addressed in a separate section below. Here OERs overlap with open access publishing. At the other end of the spectrum, there is sequencing of OERs to create a course, where there is overlap with the subject of the next chapter, MOOCs. This raises the issue of definition – what do we mean by an OER – and to answer that, we will first look at a brief history of the OER movement.
Learning Objects
The OER movement grew out of earlier work around ‘learning objects’, and many of the benefits of OER were claimed for learning objects, so it is worth examining them first. As elearning moved into the mainstream (around the year 2000), educators and institutions found they were creating often expensive learning resources from scratch. In Chapter 2 some of the influences from other fields were examined, and one such lesson from the open source movement was the efficiency in reusing parts of software code. If you want a map, a spell-checker or a style sheet, then it makes sense to take an existing one and simply call to it from your program, rather than developing one from scratch. This same relentless logic suggested that, with the digitisation of content, useful resources could be shared between institutions. This led to interest in what were termed ‘learning objects’ (or to stress their recyclable value, ‘reusable learning objects’).
Stephen Downes (2001) set out the compelling economic argument for learning objects:
[T]here are thousands of colleges and universities, each of which teaches, for example, a course in introductory trigonometry. Each such trigonometry course in each of these institutions describes, for example, the sine wave
