Open educational resources (OER) provide several benefits but also present some challenges. The key benefits are the large volume and variety of free or low-cost materials available, the flexibility to modify and combine resources, and improved access to educational content. However, locating appropriate materials can be difficult due to the large quantity available, and verifying the quality and researching the sources takes a significant amount of time. While OER have the potential to enhance teaching and learning, more research is still needed to fully understand their impacts.

1. BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES
B Y C A R O L R E E D - J O N E S
Open Educational Resources:

2. Benefit #1: Volume
 An enormous quantity and variety of materials in
many formats:
Images; videos; course lectures; books; articles; even
entire courses.

3. Benefit #2: Flexibility
 Items with derivative licenses can be excerpted or
otherwise modified.
 Portions of materials such as books, lectures, courses
can be used in part and combined in new ways,
allowing instructors to include only that material
which is relevant to their courses.
 What we teach is potentially only limited by our own
creativity in combining resources.

4. Benefit #3: Low or no cost
 Many of the materials are free or available at little
cost.
 This is a social justice issue. Where students do not
have the financial means to purchase an expensive
textbook, having free or very inexpensive OER
materials levels the playing field for all students.

5. Benefit #4: Access
 Related to cost above, access in this context means
that students in small colleges can access courses,
lectures, and materials from respected academic
institutions such as Yale, Harvard, and MIT.

6. Benefit #5: Lifelong learning
 Because these materials are public access, they do
not need to be “sold back” to textbook companies in
order for students to finance the next set of
expensive textbooks. Instead, this information can be
accessed at a future date, with germane updates.

7. Challenge #1: Locating appropriate materials
 The sheer volume of materials in OER and the large
number of databases create a challenge. Of necessity
there are multiple layers of categorization, entailing
quite a bit of hunting.
 The organization of many of these OER databases
could be improved. For example, the site
authorama.com has no search engine for titles or
subject; authors are listed alphabetically.

8. Challenge #2: Time spent
 Again, because of the amount of material to be
examined, finding and assessing OER materials
takes time:
 There is a plethora of materials to be sorted through,
and licensing to verify.
 Each likely item needs to be examined; for a one-
hour video, that means watching and taking notes
for one hour.

9. Challenge #3: Verifying quality
 Published textbooks from established academic
publishers have the process of peer review.
 For each unfamiliar source, research into the
organization or author helps in assessing quality:
was this material peer-reviewed? Determining the
value of a resource is also time-consuming.

10. Challenge #4: The research trail
 Because of the web-based nature of the databases
and the materials themselves, it is easy to lose the
electronic pathway by which a source is located.
Simply cutting and pasting a URL into a separate
document does not ensure that the source will be
easy to locate at a future date. The route to the
source should be documented as well.

11. Challenge #5: Need for research
 Anecdotal evidence seems to support the validity of
using OER materials; however:
 There is not a sufficient body of research supporting
(or refuting) the claims that OER improves student
learning.

12. Conclusions
 OER materials have the potential to make a
significant positive impact on teaching and learning.
 At this time, OER materials can be time-consuming
to research and assemble, but potentially rewarding
to use.
 Future research may indicate advantages or
disadvantages to the application of OER.