• OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.
• Open educational resources (OERs) are learning materials that can be modified and enhanced because their creators have permitted others to do so. Internet provides vast amounts of OER for use and reuse.
• Open education is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge.
• Government of India is keen to use the technological resources in helping its mission to make higher education accessible to all deserving students.
• Government of India launched its National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) in 2009 to provide opportunity for all the teachers and experts in the country to pool their collective wisdom for the benefit of every Indian learner.
• OER is not synonymous with online learning or e-learning, although many people make mistake of using the terms interchangeably.
• Although, the use of OER can support open learning/open education, OER and open education are not the same. Making 'open education' or 'open learning' a priority has significantly bigger implications than only committing to releasing resources as open or using OER in educational programmes.
• Knowledge of copyright is essential for everyone who develops learning materials or is in the writing profession, particularly to avoid committing copyright infringement. With the emergence of OER, understanding copyright has become especially important, as you can use learning materials produced by others if they are made available under an open license.
• Creative Commons License (CC) has, in education, become the most popular licensing system. Creative Commons has designed a collection of licenses to ensure that there is a suitable license for sharing content under most popular six conditions, e.g., CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, and CC BY-NC-ND