UNESCO members states unanimously approved the OER Recommendation on November 29, 2019. It is the first international normative instrument to embrace the field of openly licensed educational materials and technologies in education and builds on almost two decades of UNESCO work on OER.

The Recommendation pinpoints five essential areas of action to build and sustain a worldwide OER ecosystem:

1. Capacity-building;
2. Developing supportive policies;
3. Effective, inclusive, and equitable access to quality OER;
4. Creation of OER sustainability models; and
5. Use of international cooperation to foster OER.