OER provides benefits to both instructors and students. It allows instructors flexibility in selecting materials that fill gaps in commercial texts. For students, OER improves accessibility and lowers costs, which increases grades and reduces dropout rates. However, some challenges remain, such as finding high-quality OER materials and understanding licensing requirements for mixing and matching content from different sources. Proper understanding of Creative Commons licensing can help address these challenges.

1. Why Adopt OER?
“Why Adopt OER?” By Cathy Matresse
Licensed by CC BY 4.0 Except Where Noted Otherwise

2. Benefits and Challenges
• Typically, the benefits of OER are discussed as being beneficial because it
provides instructors a chance to mix and match the material they teach,
makes the materials more accessible to students and lowers the cost to
students.
• Student accessibility and cost have always been my number one reason to
consider OER as an alternative to commercial textbooks.
• The challenges I have had as an instructor were to find good, quality
material.

3. Cost and Accessibility
• When students are doing poorly, I ask how they study in their texts.
• How often do they read and re-read the material?
• Do they outline chapters?
• Do they take notes?
• Students often tell me they don’t have the money for text books.
• Since the text is one of the key components of the class, they need access to
this resource to be successful in class.

4. Quality of Resources
• Some of the commercial texts I have reviewed left gaps in the material I
wanted to cover.
• OER resources could fill in some of those gaps as I could create my own
material by mixing and matching other resources created in the commons.
• Research is now available indicating that students often do better with OER
because they have access to the text free of charge which increases grades
and reduces drop-out rates.

5. Challenges
• One of the challenges involved in OER is the awareness of OER by
instructors about what exactly OER is, how to work with it, and what the
research shows about its advantages.
• One of the biggest challenges involved in OER is learning to navigate this
issue of mixing and matching material by clearly understanding the licensing
aspects and requirements.

6. Licensing
• Understanding the licensing criteria can be found at Creative Commons.
• As the adage goes, “Some restrictions apply.”
• Understanding how items are marked for sharing can be found on the next
slide.

8. Resources
• About CC Licenses
• https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/
• Open Educational Resources
• https://towson.libguides.com/oer/why-oer
• What are Creative Commons Licenses?
• https://www.wur.nl/en/article/What-are-Creative-Commons-licenses.htm