Discusses Benefits and Challenges of OER

1. OER Extreme Benefits and
Notable Challenges
Ana Balske

2. Extreme Benefits of OER - Cost
Savings
• Potential cost savings is a huge benefit to students
• Having this option challenges the publishers to really up
their game in what is offered to students
• additional perks to buying a text
• publishers now offer students more options such a loose
leaf texts at lower cost

3. Extreme Benefits of OER - Access
to Education
• More people are now able to access
• Textbooks
• Publications
• Images
• Whole courses online
• Promotes learning in an entirely different way
• Global sharing of information

4. Extreme Benefits of OER -
Collaboration
• More educators have the ability to collaborate
• Pedagogical insights and methods
• Teaching materials
• Specialized fields share
• exploratory research findings and laboratory techniques on sites
such as ResearchGate
• databanks are being opened up for interested parties to
participation datamining efforts
• companies and regulators recognize there is enables advancement
in tackling questions which are perceived to yield low profits
• Rare diseases and rare cancers have been areas of focus in the
past 5 years for FDA

5. Extreme Benefits of OER - Up to
date information
• Materials updated as information changes
• At low cost
• very quickly

6. Extreme Benefits of OER - Enable
Innovative Teaching
• By encouraging early widespread sharing of content
in various formats OER would be expected to
encourage educators:
• To gain insight into how students best learn
• To gain insight into how to attract students to
critical areas of study
• Experiment with low cost/free educational
resources
• Tailor teaching to various learning styles at low
• Enhancement of course content

7. Challenges of OER – Quality of
Materials
• It is difficult to ensure the quality control of
all the resources
• The shear quantity of the resources is daunting
• More verification standards will need to be put
unto place

8. Challenges of OER – Adoption is
still an issue
• Although there are many good sources of OER, only a
subset of educators are using OER consistently
• Mastering the technology is still an issue
• Fast paced changes to the technology to access
the resources and use properly can be a challenge
(time consuming)
• It seems in many institutions OER as the
only resource in a class setting is not
accepted

9. Challenges of OER – No incentive to
authors of OER
• There are no financial incentives to produce
• Mastering the technology is difficult
• Keeping up with changes in the field would be
difficult particularly without financial
incentives
• There is no way to monitor if the resource is being
used as intended

10. Challenges of OER – Potential
Liabilities to Creators
• OER support organization and creators may face
business liability in the course of creating their
educational products
• Should there be errors or inability to keep
content up to date.
• Potential or perceived copyright issues may
discourage open access

11. Challenges of OER – Available
predominately in English
• Not available in other languages and this limits
accessibility
• Non-English speakers cannot take advantage of the
resources and face the further issue that a huge
amount of information is now made available to
English speaker creating an unintended disparity

12. OER Benefits Outweigh the
Challenges
• Although there are many challenges, OER bring with
it a great possibilities for access and collaboration
that I do not think our society can afford to do
without.