The word open is receiving a lot of attention in education circles. Openness in higher education has been discussed recently by writers in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, EDUCAUSE Review, and EQ, among other publications.¹ In January 2010, The Horizon Report, produced by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), declared that open content will “reach mainstream use” in higher education within the next twelve months.² But what does that mean? What is this open we keep hearing about?

For over a decade, open has been used as an adjective to modify a variety of nouns that describe teaching and learning materials. For example, open content, open educational resources, open courseware, and open textbooks are all part of the current higher education discourse. In this context, the adjective open indicates that these textbooks and other teaching and learning resources are provided for free under a copyright license that grants a user permission to engage in the “4R” activities:

• Reuse: the right to reuse the content in its unaltered/verbatim form (e.g., make a backup copy of the content)
• Revise: the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
• Remix: the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
• Redistribute: the right to share copies of the original content, the revisions, or the remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)³