Advantages and Disadvantages of OER

1. Open Educational
Resources
By: Charlene Freyberg

2. Overview of learning outcomes:
1. Explain the benefits of Open
Educational Resources (OER)
2. Explain some disadvantages of Open
Educational Resources (OER)

3. Advantages of OER
• OER can give access to learning for students anywhere in the world, at any time and they can
access the materials again and again (no pay walls or subscriptions to textbook companies or
educational companies with limited time (i.e. 3 months, 6 months).
• OER can be distributed to multiple courses, multiple instructors, or campuses with little to no cost.
• OER has flexible course content to include videos, podcasts, written work and other modes of
educational content for students to participate in learning content.

4. Advantages of OER
• OER can update and improve data and statistics information in a timely fashion compared to
traditional textbooks who take multiple years to update data—causing timeliness issues.
• OER can be quickly improved, edited or changed due to user feedback from students or faculty.

5. Disadvantages of OER
• There can be quality issues with content and material since OER repositories allow any user to
create an account and post material (creating accuracy issues or relevancy issues with material
posted).
• Language barriers can happen with OER resources since many resources are only available in
English, leaving out many non-English speakers in courses at a disadvantage or access or read the
material.
• Technology issues can happen as students may have trouble with accessing the material with slow
or unreliable internet connections or any be able to access when on college campus with internet
access.

6. Disadvantages of OER
• Time consuming from a copyright and intellectual property rights point of view. Since OER’s
are meant to be shared openly, instructors using the material must check to ensure that they
are not violating any copyright laws on materials used.
• Sustainability and updating material can be cumbersome since OER instructors (or creators)
are not paid for updating course content and work--there may be little incentive for them to
update their OER content or to ensure that it will continue to be available online.