Class project for a training on open educational resources

1. Open Educational Resources
Benefits and Challenges

2. What are Open Educational Resources?
Books, documents, assessments, lectures and other
resources that are useful for teaching and learning,
shared under an open license.
Public domain clipart from https://openclipart.org/

3. Benefits of OERs
Lower-cost for students: many OERs are freely available.
Improved access: OERs can reach a wider audience than traditionally copyrighted
works, hopefully providing educational opportunities for populations who have been
under-served in the past.
Customizable: under certain types of Creative Commons licenses, users are free to
remix the content to better suit their purpose.
Clear legal guidelines: Creative Commons licenses provide easy to understand
guidelines for how material may be used and shared.
Community building: Creative Commons licenses promote a culture of open sharing
and collaboration, while allowing the original author control over how the material is
attributed, used and shared.

4. Challenges of OERs
Awareness: OERs are new in education, and many educators may not be aware of their existence, how
to find appropriate OERs, and / or the legality of using them.
Availability: Not all subjects will have a robust set of open resource materials. Even for the subjects that
do, searching and sorting through all the possibilities requires more time than selecting a pre-packaged
set of materials from a traditional publisher.
Quality control: Anyone can publish material under an open license for any topic. While many
resources will be written by content area experts and be of high quality, it may be hard for an individual
educator to judge the quality or accuracy of a resource.
Maintenance: As a subject field or style of pedagogy changes, educational materials will need to
change as well. An individual who produces an OER may not have the time, resources or inclination to
keep it up to date.
Bias: Due to the quality control and maintenance issues, openly available resources may be viewed
with suspicion by an educator’s colleagues, institution or even students.