This document discusses the benefits and challenges of open education resources (OER). The benefits include cost savings for students from free materials, access to quality materials from top universities, helping students prepare for and retain knowledge from a course. However, there are also challenges such as ensuring the quality of all OER materials, whether organizations will continue financial support, shifting from traditional textbooks, and difficulty finding high quality materials in a specific discipline.

1. BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES
OF OPEN EDUCATION
RESOURCES
ELIZABETH DONLEY
CLARK COLLEGE
OCTOBER 2014

2. BENEFITS
1. Provides cost savings for students
• OER materials are free so with quality materials, it is possible to get rid of the
textbook FOREVER!
2. Allows access to quality materials from top universities
• With universities like MIT, Harvard, and Yale sharing their coursework, quality
course work is easy to find.
3. Helps students prepare for a course
• If materials are open to the public, students can evaluate a course before it
begins to determine if it is the right course for the student.
4. Helps students retain course materials more easily
• If materials are open to the public, students can access materials AFTER the
course concludes, which can aid in retaining course knowledge.
5. Sharing of content is easy and hassle-free
• Since OER materials are “open” license materials, no need to contact authors or
worry about copyright.

3. CHALLENGES
1. Can you guarantee the quality of these materials?
• Not all OERs are created equally and it is important to evaluate each carefully.
2. Will colleges and organizations continue to support OER financially?
• If funds don’t continue for the support of these resources, what will happen to
them? They will likely become obsolete, and their quality will be questioned.
3. Does the public really understand OER and its potential for changing education?
• Shifting away from the traditional textbook culture may be hard for some to
swallow.
4. Once someone uses OER materials, the licenses are “non-revocable”; so, you cannot
stop someone from using your work even if you have stopped offering the work
under a CC license.
• What happens when you update your materials but someone is still using the
old stuff? This could be problematic.
5. It can be difficult and time-consuming to find quality materials in your discipline.
• My experiences when looking for materials for one of the class assignments was
that it takes a lot of time. I’m not sure faculty will be willing to put in that up-front
time unless they really know there are quality materials out there that will
continue to be supported.