A brief list of benefits and challenges posed by open educational resources.

1. Open Educational Resources:
benefits and challenges
By Jonathan Cowles
Licensed under CC BY SA

2. Benefits of OER
1. Saving money
• It’s important to be sensitive to the economic situation of students
2. Diminish the power of textbook publishers to charge overly high prices
• The price of textbooks is increasing at more than 3x the overall rate of inflation
3. Encouraging further open sharing
• Students will see the benefits of open resources and are more likely to openly license
their own future work
4. Facilitate sharing of educational experiences
• People have the resources to share the knowledge they have acquired with others
5. Collaborate to increase material quality
• Resources can be iteratively improved by successive authors

3. Challenges of OER
1. Finding open resources
• It is hard to know where to look or the tools to use without significant guidance
2. Avoiding low-quality resources
• Sifting through the low-quality resources can be very time consuming
3. Uncertainty over license or copyright status
• Information may be absent or fall under complex public domain laws
4. Navigating copyright misuse
• Sometimes others improperly claim copyright on public domain resources without
modifying them
5. Giving proper attribution
• How to attribute works is not obvious without training