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OER stands for Open Educational Resources. OER Commons brings Web 2.0 features to educational materials in order to improve resources through use.

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Here are a few OER-related terms in brief:

• Open Educational Resources (OER) – Teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student, or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world.

  OER that can be accessed through OER Commons are created, housed, and maintained through institutions, collections, and authors that partner with OER Commons to share their data.

• Web 2.0 – The second generation of the Web, which moves beyond the static, one way flow and siloed use of Web information, and encompasses social networking tools, technology and new use patterns that facilitate communication and collaboration between Web users and a two-way flow of information between sites and users.
• Social networking tools – Tools that allow users to collaborate and communicate around their interests and OER. Social networking tools include, e.g., tags, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and user portfolios.
  
• Reuse – The adaptation, remixing or modification of OER for new and/or local purposes.
• Localization – The process through which educational resources are adapted to meet local teaching and learning needs. Resource localization might entail, e.g., translating a lesson plan into another language, removing parts of a course module that are too complex for a given set of students.
• Peer production – The process of online, collaborative content creation by peers, most often facilitated through an authoring platform or wiki. The project Free High School Science Texts, which draws on online volunteers and a collaborative authoring platform to create free-to-use textbooks for South African schools, is one example of the peer production process.
• Licensing – The process of choosing and assigning a license to an open educational resource by the original creator of that resource. OER creators can choose from several licenses offered by organizations such as Creative Commons—with the license typically stipulating the conditions under which that resource can be used, shared, adapted or distributed by other users.