| APRIL-JUNE 2010 (Vol. 3, No. 2) pp. 83-84 1939-1382/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE Published by the IEEE Computer Society Guest Editorial: Open Educational Resources
The term "open educational resources" (OER) was first proposed at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries. Open educational resources are learning content or tools that are offered free of charge under a copyright license granting permissions for users to engage in the "4R" activities: reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. In essence, open educational resources are learning objects that use an open source license. Although there are different licensing schemes (most notably the Creative Commons suite—see http://creative commons.org), they all focus on removing at least one source of friction for "share and reuse" of learning resources: the apprehension of reusing material for which the license is unclear or difficult to adhere to. This is certainly not the only problem related to reuse [ 3 ]: findability, technical interoperability of content fragments, pedagogical constraints and affordances, and design for reuse are some of the other barriers. Still, the field of OER has gained considerable momentum and the abundance of content that it helps to unlock for reuse has acted as a platform for innovation in many respects. The papers in this issue present some of the early results of research around that innovation. Historically, much of the scholarly discourse around open educational resources has focused on nontechnological issues like legal aspects around licensing, the moral imperative of sharing educational materials for the benefit of individuals in rural areas and developing nations, and business model problems with sustaining enterprises whose primary activity is giving things away for free. Like the discourse around its conceptual predecessor, the learning object, relatively little attention has been paid to specific pedagogical implications of the open educational resources approach to educational media. Unlike the vibrant technical discourse around learning objects, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the technical aspects that do or should underpin the open educational resources movement. This is partly because those working in the open educational resources area have inherited a rich body of technical work from learning objects researchers (e.g., the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) Learning Objects Metadata standards work). However, the open educational resources assumption that content and tools can be freely revised, remixed, and redistributed creates new opportunities and challenges not present in prior learning objects work [ 1 ]. Some of the technical challenges that OER enable us to research further include: This special issue includes reports of research work in the new spaces of technical possibility created by open educational resources. All in all, we are very happy with this special issue on the research issues surrounding OER—a movement that continues to gather momentum. We are grateful that the prestigious IEEE TLT agreed to host this issue. And, most of all, we hope that it will help you, dear reader, in your research on this and related topics. Your feedback is most welcome! Erik Duval David Wiley Guest Editors For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to: lt@computer.org. REFERENCES Erik Duval is a professor in the Computer Science Department of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His research focuses on the management of and access to structured and unstructured data. This includes metadata, repositories, federated search, and harvesting, but also more end-user-oriented aspects like information visualization, mobile information devices, multitouch displays, and massive hyper-personalization ("The Snowflake Effect"). Typical application domains are technology-enhanced learning, access to music, and "research2.0." Dr. Duval teaches courses on Human-Computer Interaction and problem solving and design. He cofounded two spin-offs that apply research results for access to music and scientific output. David Wiley is an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University. His research focuses on access to educational opportunities, including open content, open educational resources, licensing, related business model issues, and uses of educational data mining to improve teaching and learning. Dr. Wiley teaches courses in open education, instructional design, grant writing, and new media in learning. He is the Chief Openness Officer of Flat World Knowledge and founder of the Open High School of Utah.
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Detection of reuse: Using, for instance, plagiarism detection technologies, it is possible to identify reused instances of fragments of educational resources. This is important information in many ways. First of all, as researchers, it enables us to investigate what kind of resources are more reused than others, how these resources are reused, etc. On a more pragmatic level, information about reuse of resources can help to rank more relevant candidate resources higher, either in search results or in a more proactive setting as recommendations. 
