A quick look at OER when utilizing them in a college course.

1. The benefits and challenges found when using Open Educational
Resources within the classroom
By Barry Walther, Lower Columbia College
bwalther@lcc.ctc.edu

2.  The benefits to incorporating OER into class curriculum
 Reduces barriers for students
 Adaptable content
 Increase accessibility for students and the community
 Peer collaboration with others
 Current and up-to-date materials
 Challenges found when searching for and utilizing OER
 Finding specific content
 Quality of the resource
 Time spent navigating OER sites
 Technology barriers
 Sustainability of resources

3.  Reduces barriers for students by eliminating the cost of books
 The financial burden on students is ever increasing, such as increasing tuition costs. A
lot of students that are enrolled at a community college are signed up for financial aid as
many do not have jobs, or jobs that pay enough, or have a lot of external financial
obligations that makes life a bit more difficult. Incorporating open educational resources
is just one way we can help reduce that burden for students, allowing more students to
have the confidence to enroll and succeed in their classes.
 Adaptable to course outcomes
 Besides the general courses, like mathematics and English, course outcomes can greatly
vary. It can be difficult adopting a whole textbook as only portions of it apply to the
course. Often instructors may need to incorporate several books to cover the range of
outcomes the class needs to cover. When dealing with regular expensive textbooks this
can be too much of a burden on the students. A lot of open educational resources can be
modify to fit the needs of the class, for one or more of the course outcomes.

4.  Increase accessibility for students and the community
 The resources are online, so anyone with internet access can use them. They may be
students in college or just anyone that wants to learn.
 Collaboration with others using shared materials
 Open educational resources are created and then shared online with others. Others can
then modify them and share them online again, improving the materials each time. This
can increase the richness of the content as each person adds more to it.
 Current and up to date materials
 The turn around time is much faster than for regular textbooks, which have to go
through the publisher and get updated to a new edition. This means that if there are any
errors in the OER it can be revised and updated in a very short period of time.

5.  Finding content for a specific subject area or topic within a course
 If you have a course that covers specific subjects outside of the more common areas, such
as mathematics, science, and English, then finding relatable resources can prove
challenging. There might be a very limited selection of resources available for your
subject area. This may require you to get fairly creative in adopting existing OER
content.
 Quality of the resource
 A lot of open educational resources are made by individuals, or small teams, with limited
time and budgets. It can be hard to compete with the amount of money that goes into
textbooks to create original images, videos, question banks, audible book versions, and
other features. The resources available as OER typically have limited features and may
still contain a lot of errors due to a lack of an editor.

6.  Time spent navigating OER sites
 There are many different OER sites to utilize but each one is different. You can spend a
lot of time searching through the various databases, through their menus or by
searching using various keywords. If you have a specific subject area then using the
correct keywords is very important. Also there are a lot of duplicated files that are
different versions of the same thing with very similar titles but with different authors. It
takes additional time reviewing each one to make sure you find the one that works best
for you.
 Technology barriers
 With the resources being online it can be difficult for students that do not have good
reliable access to the internet. There are still a lot of students that only have a cellphone
so using online resources can be difficult due to the screen size and formatting issues. If
students need a printed versions then hopefully the OER has a printable version
available and the student has access to a printer or a print shop in order to make
physical copies.

7.  Sustainability of resources
 There are a lot of great open educational resources available online but as they get older
their creators may not have any incentives to update them. There is even the risk that
some resources get taken down from the internet as websites get updated. There is also
the issue that as technology changes some files may not work on newer systems
anymore. For example, software created with Java is now harder to use. There are often
ways to work around that issue but it does increase the complexity of using those
resources.

8.  There are definitely some challenges when using OER within the scope of a
course’s curriculum but if given enough time to research and adopt them there are
tremendous benefits to the students and to the course overall.
 4 Key takeaways:
 Save students money
 Flexible content
 Time consuming to research and incorporate
 A lot of resources for common subject areas, limited resources for less common ones