The document discusses the benefits and challenges of using open educational resources (OER) instead of traditional textbooks. The benefits include materials being more reflective of students, flexible to tailor to specific classes, less expensive for students, and allowing students to participate in creating course content. However, challenges are that OER may lack cohesion, take time to compile and ensure is error-free, add more work for faculty without additional support, have limited content for specialized courses, and require extra effort to teach non-native English speaking students about Creative Commons licensing.

1. OER: Benefits and Challenges

2. Benefits of OER # 1
• OER makes it more possible to find materials
that are less homogenous and more reflective
of the students in my classroom. The
textbooks in our program are very non-
reflective, in an attempt to play it safe, they
are so general they are not very engaging or
authentic.
Image from Bing licensed under CC BY 2.0

3. Benefits of OER # 2
• OER materials are often more flexible so I can
add information tailored to my particular
class.
Image from Bing licensed under CC BY 2.0

4. Benefits of OER # 3
• It benefits the students by being less
expensive.
Image from Bing licensed under CC BY 2.0

5. Benefits of OER # 4
• In some cases it means not having to reinvent
the wheel, if one can find OER resources on a
topic one is teaching.
Image from Bing licensed under CC BY 2.0

6. Benefits of OER # 5
• Students can participate in the creation and
discovery of course material.
Image from Bing licensed under CC BY 2.0

7. Challenges of OER # 1
• While OER offers more flexibility than
textbooks, they are often created by a group
of people skilled in textbook creation. It can
be challenging to pull together material that
has flow, and connection. This may change
over time as more material becomes
accessible.

8. Challenges of OER # 2
• Adding material can be a great benefit to
using OER, but it also opens the door to
making mistakes and being scattered. It can
take a lot of time to put together material that
feels cohesive.

9. Challenges of OER # 3
• While OER can save money for students it
often means more work for faculty. And as a
faculty member who has a higher workload, it
can be intense to add more work to my load. I
think there needs to be more support from
the legislature around the budget. If
Washington state wants to be proud of it’s
community college system it needs to step up.

10. Challenges of OER # 4
• At this time, there is more material available
for general courses like Biology 101 than more
specific courses like ESL level 3. So it is
difficult to find material that doesn’t have to
be heavily adapted.

11. Challenges of OER # 5
• I love having students create material. And it
can be challenging to communicate the
intricacies of Creative Commons in a language
that is not the students native language. So
doing so often adds extra work around
creating units that are in leveled English, to
teach students how to find images and how to
cite them.