General Benefits & Challenges to using Open Education

1. Benefits & Challenges to
Open Educational Resources
By Jessica Weimer, M.Ed.
For OER 101

2. Benefits
• Lower or eliminate cost for textbooks
• Increase access to education
• Ability for collaboration between
faculty – even interdisciplinary.
• Current & relevant materials
• Allow different format for learning
materials – encourages Universal
Design in courses

3. Challenges
• Not knowing how to find or access quality OER
for our discipline
• The time it takes to adopt and/or adapt new
educational materials
• College buy-in: pushback from others in
department and/or administration
• Student buy-in: some may want “real” textbooks
or feel like OER are of lower quality.
• Current and relevant materials may stop being
created as it takes time and effort to develop them,
but as open resources they give no reimbursement
aside from grant-funding.

4. In Conclusion…
• The benefits of OER outweigh the challenges.
• While it takes time and effort, our duty as faculty is to provide
the best education at the lowest cost – OER helps us do that.
• We should seek student, faculty, & administrative buy-in to
support the creation and maintenance of quality OER.