The document discusses the benefits and challenges of Open Educational Resources (OER). Some key benefits are that OER can help reduce costs for students, tap into teacher creativity during development, and fill gaps in subject areas that are missing resources. However, challenges include the potential lack of continued funding, quality control issues, overwhelming search results, and limited accessibility for some groups. Overall, the author believes the benefits of OER outweigh the challenges.

1. OER: Benefits vs.
Challenges
by Jay Friedman

2. Benefit:CostSavings
With the cost of tuition and textbooks on the
rise, use of Open Educational Resources helps
make education more affordable for students.

3. Challenge:Cost-Prohibitive
Availability of grants and other funding makes it
possible for teachers and others to develop OER
materials, but funding may dry up or disappear.
Development of materials can be time-
consuming, a disincentive to production.

4. Benefit:Creativity
Teachers who actually use the materials
frequently develop OER.This taps into the
creativity of the teachers who can make the
materials interesting, fun, attractive, and
relevant.

5. Challenge:Quality
With the freedom of developing OER comes the
question of quality control.Teachers will have to
be sure that materials are accurate, effective,
responsible, etc.

6. Benefit: Fills theGaps
Many subject areas are sorely missing resources
that students can use for their learning. OER can
help fill those gaps.

7. Challenge:Overabundance
Searches for OER can occasionally yield an
overwhelming abundance of materials.This
makes selection time-consuming and difficult.

8. Benefit: Lifelong Learning
With OER, students can access materials before,
during, and after their courses. In fact, people do
not need to actually be enrolled in formal
courses to advance their learning.

9. Challenge:Accessibility
While there’s great benefit to having OER
available through the Internet, some people (for
example, immigrants and refugees) may not
have easy ability to connect to the Internet and
the materials to be found there.

10. Benefit:Social Responsibility
OER enables the democratization of education,
removing roadblocks to learning. Allowing
access to education is important for all.

11. Challenge:Lack of Knowledge
The benefits of OER are only as good as the
public’s knowledge that OER exists. More needs
to be done to spread the word about OER.

12. OER:The FinalAnalysis
This presentation has shown both benefits and
challenges related to OER. I believe that the
benefits outweigh the challenges, and that it’s
well worth the effort in tackling the challenges to
OER as a way to make quality and affordable
education available to as many people as
possible throughout their lives.