The document discusses the open educational resources (OER) movement and its implications. It provides background information on OER, defining them as digitized materials that are freely available for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse. It notes several major OER initiatives including Wikieducators, the Free Textbook Movement, and Connexions. It also discusses who is involved in OER globally, including universities in the US, China, Japan, and France that have opened up hundreds of courses. The document analyzes data from MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative showing that OER users are broadly international and use the resources for a variety of educational purposes. It concludes by reviewing the most commonly used Creative Commons