Open Educational Resources (OER) have benefits such as reducing textbook costs to increase enrollment of underprivileged students, allowing more people to contribute to shared knowledge repositories, and providing easier access to educational materials. However, OER also face challenges like ensuring quality control of content, requiring additional class preparation time to find suitable materials, and potentially pushing online classes towards a lowest common denominator effect through over-copying of available content.

1. Open Educational Resources:
Benefits and Challenges
Chris Ruggiero

2. Open Educational Resources: Benefits
• Open Educational Resources: Benefits
• 1. Controlling the cost of textbooks which will help stimulate
enrollment of a less privileged student population
• 2. Allows more people to contribute to repositories of knowledge
• 3. Allows easier access to materials.
• 4. Moves bodies of knowledge forward in an atmosphere of
sharing and transparency.
• 5. Allows access to previously exclusive courses at schools like MIT
and Yale

3. Open Educational Resources: Challenges
• Open Education Resources: Challenges
• 1. Quality control—although it is widely available it might not be good.
• 2. Finding good materials increases class preparation time.
• 3. Some of the best textbooks are not yet available through OER.
• 4. Lowest common denominator effect where it is tempting to copy
what is available.
• 5. Using OER for online classes pushes the entire learning experience
into digital format (whereas real textbooks can be grounding for online
learne