Open Education Resources Pros and Cons

1. PROS AND CONS
By Nancy Aird

2.  Courses, modules, textbooks, videos, test,
software, tools, material, and techniques
 Adapt course content to enhance student
knowledge and interests
 Reduce cost of education by restricting text
book purchases

3.  Simple, standardized public permission to
share and use creative work
 Most widely used open educational resource
 Permission level choices coded by license
icon and HTML code
 4 elements: Attribution, No Derivatives, Share
Alike, Non-Commercial
 Licenses are human and machine friendly

4.  Copyright expired
 Free content not protected by copyright
protections
 Never had copyright protection
 Owned or created by the government.
 Work was explicitly donated to the public
domain

5.  Author chooses control over access, coping,
distributing, editing, re-mix and built upon
 Authors can still be paid by contract to create
a work
 Peer review check content before release
 High quality courses offered by institutions
for worldwide availability

6.  Consensus from various reviews that
translations are accurate
 Adapt current courses into and from foreign
languages
 Add “Alternate” or “Alt” text

7.  Difficulty accessing content by less
technological knowledgeable students
 Instructors not familiar with new format
 Instructors need to go beyond the standard,
educational format approved by authorities
 School districts invested in text

8.  Difficulty accessing content by less
technological knowledgeable students
 Instructors not familiar with new format
 Instructors need to go beyond the standard,
educational format approved by authorities

9.  Works released under CC difficult to revise
license
 Author not able reverse all CC protection if
work becomes valuable
 Some CC allow editing and revisions by users
 OER content does not go away on web, even
when it is poor quality adaptation by user

10.  Author less incentive to editing, correcting,
and updating content
 Author’s loss of control of content,
commercial reproduction and revenue stream
 Authors not credited with work in public
domain

11.  Choose between free and fee sites
 Are reviewers qualified to translate technical
works?
 Length of time the translations may take with
multiple reviewers
 Alternative text follows multiple rules for
compliance

12. This work by Nancy Aird is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International
License