Open educational resources provide several benefits including reducing costs for students and instructors, increasing access for those unable to afford textbooks, encouraging sharing of ideas and materials, allowing for feedback to improve resources over time, and providing a large volume of available materials. Some challenges to open educational resources include ensuring the quality of materials, managing licensing and proper attribution, limited availability for niche courses, the time required to locate and curate resources, and that published textbooks can be more convenient to use for instructing.

1. Open Educational Resources
Benefits

2. Benefit:
Cost
Open educational resources reduce or eliminate the
costs of materials for both the students and the
instructor.

3. Benefit:
Access
Open educational resources provide access to
students who have limited means of purchasing
textbooks and related fees.

4. Benefit:
Sharing
Open educational resources encourage sharing ideas,
materials, and information among a wide audience.

5. Benefit:
Feedback
Open educational resources allows for feedback on
materials for continual improvement, updates, and
relevancy.

6. Benefit:
Volume
Open educational resources are proliferating and
gaining ground so the shear volume of material
available is astounding.

7. Open Educational Resources
Challenges

8. Challenge:
Quality
The quality of the open educational resources can be
questionable. The integrity of the materials need to be
vetted.

9. Challenge:
License
The license of the open educational resource depends
upon the integrity of the creator as well as the proper
attribution by the subsequent user.

10. Challenge:
Availability
Open educational resources are more available for
common, popular courses, but not for more niche,
seminar, or topic-based courses.

11. Challenge:
Time
Open educational resources often require a significant
amount of time to locate, review, and assemble.

12. Challenge:
Convenience
Sometimes, it’s just easier to use a textbook,
instructor manual, and test bank to put together the
class.

13. Open Educational Resources
Benefits
• Cost
• Access
• Sharing
• Feedback
• Volume
Challenges
• Quality
• License
• Availability
• Time
• Convenience