Open educational resources (OER) provide several benefits: they allow free access to educational materials from respected institutions; enable improving course curriculums by comparing OER content; and give creators more exposure and reputation by sharing content worldwide. OER also offer opportunities for lifelong learning through self-paced study or refreshing past academic experiences. However, OER also face challenges, such as ensuring high quality when some sites are unregulated; preventing entire courses from being used without modification by for-profit programs; and maintaining and monitoring content long-term.

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2. Benefits of Open educational resources
1. Free and open access to educational materials from respected
institutions
2. Opportunity to improve similar course curriculum through comparing
and pulling from previously created courses.
3. More exposure for content creators in allowing open access
worldwide to their content and course materials, which can mean
establishing academic reputation outside of traditional means.
4. Providing life long learners opportunities to use course syllabus and
materials to learn from a self-paced learning experience or refresh
previous academic experiences.
5. Opportunity to showcase a complete course in a niche subject area
that may be largely inaccessible due to location limitations.

3. Challenges to oER
1. While some OER database sites are recognizably regulated, several
are not, making them more likely to produce low quality content.
2. Risk of “canned courses” being used by for-profit online programs in
entirety at which point professors lose motivation to create
innovative courses in their field to continue the evolution of
academic thought in their department.
3. The student revolt: when students find easy access to what they
perceive as OER equivalents to their tuition-paid classes and see
these free access courses and materials as devaluing their paid-for
education.
4. Finding host organizations that will both maintain and monitor
content long-term.
5. Timeliness of materials; while course designers create their own
documents, supporting materials and readings necessarily need to
either be CC or public domain for or easily accessible to any user,
limiting what materials can be used when a more current or
copyrighted material may simply be the better and best option.