Open Educational Resources (OER) provide free educational materials online from universities and other institutions. They include items like images, articles, lessons, and full courses. OER offer opportunities for lifelong learning to anyone with an internet connection by making information more accessible and affordable. While OER present benefits like reducing education costs and allowing customization of materials, there are also challenges to using OER. It can take time to find high-quality materials and prepare them into a course. Not all students have reliable internet access needed to use OER. Overall, OER are expanding opportunities for education as traditional tuition rates rise.

2. OER
For the past ten years, the public has seen increasing online access
to free educational resources. These resources can range from
images to articles to lessons to courses, and are offered by
outstanding universities such as Yale and MIT and other providers.
Called Open Educational Resources (OER), they provide
opportunities for the public to take advantage of information that
previously was only available to those with direct access to the
resource, those in higher education or those who had the financial
resources (primarily) to access the information.
Today, people are using OER in (and out of) academia. They present
both benefits and challenges too large to ignore. Following is a
brief presentation of some of those issues.

3. OER: a few benefits
1. Provides anyone the opportunity to
collaborate with others by using prepared
material and “mixing” it into a form that
works best for the audience (as long as its
attributed correctly).
2. Allows those not affiliated with
nationally-respected faculty to access
their thinking and creatively-borrow that
thinking to supplement their own.

4. 3. Provides a no-cost opportunity for many
to gain an education, to review what
they had learned before, to provide
supplemental information or to become
familiar with material without having to
pay tuition.
4. Provides accessible education, through
an open 24-7, distant-learning platform.
5. OER list of available offerings
continues to grow.

5. OER: a few challenges
1. May be difficult to find appropriate
material, depending on the subject being
taught.
2. Remembering the “how-to” of putting a
course (or lesson) together may
dissipate if not used frequently!
3. Can be time-consuming to prepare, both
through the search for good material
and the research necessary to find if
the material is of good enough quality

6. 4. Students without easy access to the
internet may not be able to benefit
from OER offerings.
5. When items are not “tagged” properly,
it can be time-consuming to ascertain
whether or not they can be used.
6. Although support for OER is growing,
“traditional” education has a strong
foothold.

7. Concluding remarks
At a time when tuition rates keep
rising, when post-high school education
or training is required to find living-wage
jobs, when student success is
highly valued, the alternatives created
through OER may offer opportunities
to the public, totally unavailable before.
OER are here to stay, and, weighing in
on the subject: that’s a good thing!