What the OCL report reveals then is that simply creating OERs that are of good quality and freely available may not be sufficient to ensure adoption. There is a long-standing cultural ecosystem surrounding the current use of textbooks, and the new open versions need to address all the different elements of this to bring success.
Conclusions
In the different categories of open education, OERs can be seen as occupying a middle ground, intersecting with open access, through open textbooks, and MOOCs, which can be seen as a subset of OERs. The OER field is constituted of a mixture of universities, national agencies, not-for-profit organisations and commercial interests. While there are some reservations about the intentions of the commercial players, the combination of OER providers represents a healthy mixture of different interests. The principles of OER are well established; they benefit from a fairly clear definition which foregrounds the importance of reuse and open licenses. Therefore, any entrants and participants in the field are obliged to behave in an open manner to a large extent. This may be a result of the altruistic roots of the movement and the time it had to establish itself, with educational providers and not-for-profits being the main drivers. As a consequence, educational establishments have stayed largely prominent in the field.
In terms of impact, OERs have realised success in terms of the number of resources and people accessing those, although some have criticised them for not having a greater impact on everyday practice; for example, Kortemeyer (2013) bemoans that ‘OERs have not noticeably disrupted the traditional business model of higher education or affected daily teaching approaches at most
