Open educational resources (OER) provide benefits such as flexibility in curriculum development, ability for instructors to select materials tailored to student needs, cost savings for students, and promotion of collaboration. However, key challenges to OER include long-term sustainment of OER initiatives, the time-consuming nature of finding, evaluating, and selecting appropriate materials, verifying copyright and licensing of content, and gaining support from leadership for both OER use and compensating instructors for related work.

1. Benefits and Challenges
of
Open Educational Resources
BY: RICHARD RAFFERTY

2. Benefits
Allows flexibility in curriculum development
Allows instructors to select materials that:
 can tap into student learning styles
 help motivate students
 take advantage of students’ multiple intelligences
 Provides cost savings to students
Promotes collaboration among educational institutions/organizations
Allows use of up-to-date (up to the moment) materials

3. Challenges
Long-term sustainment of the OER initiative
Time consuming to locate, evaluate, and select materials
Verifying materials are in the public domain or under a common license
Convincing leadership to allow the use of OER
Convincing leadership that instructors should be compensated for time spent searching for,
evaluating, revising, and incorporating OER