Open Educational Resources (OER) provide benefits such as creating social equality through accessible quality resources, helping students reduce costs by using open textbooks and materials, and enhancing the reputation of institutions that create OER. However, challenges to OER include needing to create awareness and understanding to gain more users and creators, ensuring the resources are high-quality and relevant, and determining who maintains and updates the resources over time under the irrevocable Creative Commons licenses.

1. Sky Nanashino Gombie CC BY 2.0
Open Educational Resources OER – SBCTC
May 2016
Benefits
and
Challenges
of OER
Julie Cartwright Assignment 9.1

2. Benefits• Creates social equality
• Enables anyone to access quality resources
• Assists students to keep costs low by utilising
open access text books and other resources
• Open access resources are usable and reusable by
anyone without the concerns of copyright
constraints
• Enhances the reputation of the institution that
created the resources
• OER reaches the widest possible audience
• OER creates additional opportunities for peer
review
Sky Nanashino Gombie CC BY 2.0

3. Challenges
• Creating awareness and public understanding to
gain critical mass; users and creators
• OER resources can be located but still need to be
assessed on quality and relevance
• Sustainability and continued updating who is
responsible for making these currency and
relevancy judgements on individual OER
• Once OER, forever OER. Irrevocable nature of
Creative commons licences
Sky Nanashino Gombie CC BY 2.0