A distance learner attending a tutoring session in Mozambique. Open Educational Resources makes grants to make high-quality educational materials available for free, anywhere in the world. Photo: Rosario Passos

Open Educational Resources (OER) are high-quality, openly licensed educational materials that offer an extraordinary opportunity for people everywhere to share, use, and reuse knowledge. It also demonstrates great potential as a mechanism for instructional innovation as networks of teachers and learners share best practices.

Since 2002, the Hewlett Foundation has worked with OER grantees to improve education globally by making high-quality academic materials openly available on the Internet. The Education Program continues to work toward establishing a self-sustaining and adaptive global OER ecosystem and demonstrating its potential to improve teaching and learning.

The Education Program invests in organizations that:

• Develop OER for K-12 and community colleges, expand OER networks, and develop guidelines and tools for the field
• Promote policies or strategies that create funding and other incentives to increase access to learning through OER and provide communications and technical assistance for policymakers in support of increasing access to learning through OER
• Research and evaluate the impact of OER on teaching and learning
• Develop innovative OER models

For 2011 and beyond, the Program's OER investments will focus primarily on:

• Supporting the infrastructure needed to sustain a well-functioning open educational ecosystem
• Demonstration projects that strengthen student access to deeper learning in K-12 and community colleges

In fall 2010, we will begin to accept unsolicited letters of inquiry for Open Educational Resources, for consideration for funding in 2011 and beyond.