The phrase "Open Educational Resources" or OER was adopted by UNESCO in 2002 to describe educational materials that are freely available online for anyone to use. OER includes learning content, courses, tools for creating and delivering content, and intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing. There are currently over 2,500 open access courses available from over 200 universities worldwide. Various initiatives and projects provide open textbooks, encyclopedia entries, and learning objects that can be mixed together for courses. While intended for educators, the majority of OER users are actually learners. Ensuring the long-term sustainability of OER initiatives requires addressing costs of production, distribution, and maintaining visibility over time through various funding models.

3. China: 451

4. Japan: 350

5. France: 178 More open educational resource projects are emerging at educational institutions in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Hungary, India, Iran, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam.

8. While the UNESCO definition of the term states that teachers are the primary audience of open educational resources and that students are secondary users, in practice learners make up the great majority of users. MIT OCW, one of the most popular collections of open educational resources, reports that only 16% of its users are educators (Carson, 2006) . Sustainability in Open Education