ABSTRACT
The open educational resources movement is conventionally dated from the time in 2001 when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced it would put its complete programme catalogue online — thus it has been underway for around 12 years. However, until recently the focus across the world has been on provision of resources: even in the last few years the only other focus was on provision-related issues such as quality, accreditation and usability. Apart from the major (but specific) studies of user needs and behaviour done by MIT and a few open universities there has until recently been little else that focused on issues of learners and how (and why) they use OER. This chapter aims to fill that gap. It is based largely on a survey of the OER literature, linked to a survey of the wider literature on online resources where one can draw conclusions relevant to OER.
