Assignment for Open Educational Resources 2014

2. OER – Open Educational Resources
 Openly sharing education resources for the purpose of
providing high quality education to everyone for free.

3. It all sounds great, but there are benefits and
challenges.
Open source goes to high school by opensource.com with CC by SA-2.0

4. Benefits to OER
 COST = Zero
Resources are free for anyone that wants to look
them up.
 Raises the standard of education by including ideas
and experiences of multiple experts in the field of
study.

5. More OER Benefits
 Choices – there are so many. For example:
Textbooks, Lessons, Courses, Photos, Videos, Articles,
Songs, Books can all be obtained openly.
 Peer review – you can share your own lessons with
others and have the feedback from peers and other
students while still getting credit for your work.

6. Social Responsibility – giving credit
where credit is due
 With OER the person that
writes the article, does the
research, takes the photo,
creates the video gets credit
for their work with a Creative
Commons license.
 Picture: Thanks Pal by C.Bollacker
with CC by NC-SA-2.0

7. Challenges
As with
everything
there are
challenges and
problems to
watch out for!
Game of skill? By C.Bollacker with
CC by NC-ND 2.0

8. Challenges in OER
 Quality of the resource – Just because a piece of work
has a Creative Commons license does not mean it
contains the most current or correct information.
 Although the number and variety of OER are
increasing, there is some subject areas with limited
resources. Pictures and videos seem to me to be more
numerous and varied than textbooks and courses.

9. Challenges continued
 Public domain resources are very useful since but the
numerous rules make using these resources very
cumbersome unless it was published before 1923 or
produced by the US Federal Government.
 OER takes time and knowledge to obtain properly.
 Choosing the type of CC license you want for you work
takes some thought and reflection. CC licenses are non
revocable and you can’t stop someone’s use of your
material after you have released it. You can
discontinue the license but the work has already been
released.

10. Conclusion
I feel the benefits outweigh the
challenges in the case of OER.
The choices available will
increase, the quality of resources
always has to be assessed, and
knowledge of how to use these
resources will increase. The fact
that gaining knowledge is not
limited to those that can pay for
it is a tremendous benefit and
worth challenges to realize a
students potential.