Users of Open Educational Resources (OERs) should be able to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute. As Clint Lalonde mentions in his post, most OERs are released in PDF. PDF is a popular file format, no doubt, but releasing OERs in PDF format kills the spirit of open.

PDF cannot be easily edited, so Revise and Remix go out of the window.

So, what are the alternates? I can think of few. .odt, markups, LATEX.

Clint recommends steps to modify OERs available in different formats in this post. Based on the post, Cheryl Cuillier and her team wrote a guide. The efforts are commendable, but there must be a way to get things right from the beginning.

Maybe there is. The solution is simple, though it might not be easy. OER creators should grab the bull by its horn and release the source material whenever they publish the OERs.

To help Open Education movement on this front, I am starting a guide for OER creators and publishing platforms to release source materials. Join me by editing this collaborative document on Google docs.