Necessity of OER: Benefits and Challenges

1. Social Justice
and the
Necessity of
OER
By Jay McLean-Riggs

2. Why is OER important?
• Beyond the benefits of Open Educational
Resource, if we are to pursue a world with
greater social justice it is a necessity.
• Traditional textbooks are often inaccessible
to less well resourced communities, and they
have traditionally carried a major bias
towards the dominant culture.

3. Inequality in Educational
Opportunity
Barriers to Education with
Textbooks
• Inability to access the book because of
resource constraints (choosing
between food or housing or the book)
causing anxiety and poor performance.
• Waiting to access the book until weeks
into the quarter because of resource
constraints, students fall behind.
• No experience or learning around how
to use a textbook results in overwhelm
and a sense of inadequacy.

4. Barriers to Education with
Textbooks
• Inaccessible language as texts are written
by academics and often use formal
language and field specific vocabulary.
• Culturally constrained and often
inappropriate for diverse populations.
Texts often cater to a particular
demographic making them inaccessible
for learning for many.
• Dated material in old editions making
second class citizen status. Students who
are forced to buy older books fail to
benefit from updates and improvement in
the texts.

5. Some of the Benefits of OER
1. More financially accessible : free or low cost.
2. Available in good time for students success : digital.
3. More diverse voices for more meaningful and innovative pedagogy.
4. More accessible to more students in language and organization
5. Less controlled by small groups of publishers.
6. More easily available ancillary resources that can be customized for instructor
use especially at short notice.
7. Easier to modify, adjust and select parts by the instructors for more student
centered multimodal learning.

6. Some Challenges of OER
1. Time consuming to research, retrieve and modify for instructors in
the initial onboarding of OER.
2. Less credibility amongst conventional instructors. Can be
challenging for instructors to convince departments, coordinators
etc. to allow OER use.
3. Requires more attention to detail and quality for instructors.
Quality control is not institutionalized.
4. Permanence is not assured as digital material can ”disappear”.
5. Missing ancillary resources as not all OER texts or materials
contain instructor resources.

7. Leveling the
Playing Field
and Justice:
benefits
outweigh
challenges
• Social justice issues are most often taken up by
people who are less well resourced and less
profit oriented making the work depend on
people without large amounts of time and
money to complete it.
• This is a transitional time in education as we
move away from many traditional pathways.
More online classes and degrees, more you tube
courses and other forms of certification are
becoming increasingly prominent and accepted.
OER is a part of that movement.