The document discusses open educational resources (OER) and their potential benefits and challenges. It defines OER as educational materials that are freely available in the public domain or with an open license, allowing anyone to legally copy, use, adapt and share them. Potential benefits include cost savings for students, increased faculty creativity and engagement, and improved access to education globally. Challenges include ensuring quality, long-term sustainability, lack of public understanding, and gaining stakeholder buy-in due to fears over quality and copyright. To advance OER, the document argues that more education is needed to inform people about the benefits while also addressing the challenges of quality, sustainability, and stakeholder concerns.

1. Open Education for All
Open Education Resources: World Changer or Unrealistic
Idealism?
By Erin L Baker

2. Presentation Overview
• Definition of Open Educational Resources (OER)
• Benefits
• Challenges
• Where do we go from here?

3. Definition of OER
• Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational
materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open
license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can
legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs range
from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests,
projects, audio, video and animation.
From United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
website (www.unesco.org), Communication and Information page

4. Benefits of Open
• Students save money, which increases
retention
• Faculty can be more creative and therefore
more engaged with their materials, which
increases student engagement and
retention.
• Because faculty could now feel more
comfortable about the legality of their use
of materials, they push themselves and
their students further in learning.
• Peer Review – the more people who read
your stuff and offer suggestions, the better
your stuff gets – the better everybody’s
stuff gets.
• We start to take the dollar signs off
education, making it available to more
people. An educated world makes a better
world.
• New faculty can have a comfortable place
to go to get their materials, rather than
scramble a class together last minute.

5. Challenges of Open
• Quality Assurance
Anyone can put anything on the
internet and it’s pretty easy to get a
creative commons license. It would be
fair to say that it is possible that not all
open materials are quality.
• Sustainability
For the last several years, there has
been grant money to support the work
it takes to produce quality material.
Will there continue to be money in the
future? Will we be able to keep
updating and creating if there isn’t?
• Lack of public understanding
Many people don’t understand the
concept of open resources and because
they don’t understand either by-pass it,
thinking it isn’t worth their time or don’t
use it for fear of misusing copyrights.
• Stakeholder Buy-In
This is due to lack of understanding as
stated above as well as fear of judgment.
A lot of faculty don’t want others to look
at their materials and judge them as unfit
or out of context.

6. Where Do We Go From Here?
• The biggest thing that needs to drive this
train is education. We need to educate
ourselves and others. No, not just educate,
but also excite people. There are so many
benefits to OER we need to light a bonfire
letting the world know. BUT, we also need
to be very wary of the challenges and
continue to work with our eyes open,
develop and maintain quality assurance,
create plans for sustainability, educate and
assuage people’s fears. Let’s “go hand-in-
hand”, and not “walk alone in fear.”