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Education is a matter of sharing, and the open educational resources approach is designed specifically to enable extremely efficient and affordable sharing.

Clearly, the Internet has empowered us to copy and share with an efficiency never before known or imagined. However, long before the Internet was invented, copyright law began regulating the very activities the Internet makes essentially free (copying and distributing). Consequently, the Internet was born at a severe disadvantage, as preexisting laws discouraged people from realizing the full potential of the network.

While existing laws, business models, and educational practices make it difficult for instructors and learners to leverage the full power of the Internet to access high-quality, affordable learning materials, open educational resources can be freely copied and shared (and revised and remixed) without breaking the law. Open educational resources allow the full technical power of the Internet to be brought to bear on education. OER allow exactly what the Internet enables: free sharing of educational resources with the world.

Under the current copyright laws, instructors are essentially powerless to legally improve the materials they use in their classes. OER provide instructors with free and legal permissions to engage in continuous quality-improvement processes such as incremental adaptation and revision, empowering instructors to take ownership and control over their courses and textbooks in a manner not previously possible.

when the National Science Foundation gives a grant to a university to produce a pre-engineering curriculum, you and I have already paid for it. However, it is almost always the case that these products are commercialized in such a way that access is restricted to those who are willing to pay for them a second time. Why should we be required to pay a second time for the thing we've already paid for?

"Open access" refers to research articles that are freely and openly available to the public for reading, reviewing, and building upon.

MOOCs are typically based on a "connectivist" philosophy that eschews educator-specified learning goals and supports each person in learning something different. One way of understanding the MOOC design is to say that it applies the "open" ethos to course outcomes. In other words, students are empowered to learn what they need/want to learn, and the journey of learning is often more important than any predefined learning outcomes.

Openness is impacting many areas of education—teaching, curriculum, textbooks, research, policy, and others. How will these individual impacts synergize to transform education? Will new and traditional education entities leverage the Internet, the affordances of digital content (almost cost-free storage, replication, and distribution), and open licensing to share their education and research resources? If they do, will more people be able to access an education and, if so, what will that mean for individuals, families, countries, and economies? If scientists and researchers have open access to the world's academic journal articles and data, will diseases be cured more quickly? Will governments require that publicly funded resources be open and free to the public that paid for them? Or will openness go down in the history books as just another fad that couldn't live up to its press? Only time will tell.