The Benefits & Challenges of Open Educational Resources (OER)

Karen FernandezMarch 6, 2015

Benefits

1. Reduces the cost of student textbooks and makes education accessible.

2. Instructors can pick and choose pieces of different OER according to the needs of a course.

3. Allows students from all over the world to study and learn even if they are not enrolled in college.

More Benefits

4. Creation and distribution of OER increases the prestige of an educational institution in the community. It’s another form of academic publishing.5. OER encourages collaboration and sharing between instructors, students, and institutions. 6. OER also improves teaching by exposing different approaches to the same subject in OER.

Challenges

1. Finding high quality and relevant materials may be time consuming and difficult for instructors.

2. OER content could disappear if the content is taken down from the server. Or content could change unexpectedly.

3. OER content may not be updated regularly and become stale.

More challenges

4. Instructors may need to develop additional materials to fill in the gaps in order to make OER work. More work for them.5. While institutions may support faculty using OER, they may be reluctant to pay (or release from other duties) instructors to develop OER materials.