Open Educational Resources (OER) provide several benefits such as lowering educational costs for students, allowing customization of content for specific classrooms, and not requiring new editions due to textbook updates. However, OER also face challenges including ensuring quality assurance, developing sustainable plans to prevent projects from disappearing, providing adequate accessibility support, making it difficult to locate OER across repositories, and inability to change licensing once published.

1. Open Educational
Resources (OER)
BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES
By: Tyler L. Wallace
Graphic top right "Open Educational Resources" by Markus Büsges (leomaria design) für Wikimedia
Deutschland e. V. is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

2. Benefits of OER
• Cost Savings – students save substantial educational costs by using OER, making
education a more level playing field for all*
• Customization – content can be customized and remixed to create new material
applicable to the instructor’s specific classroom needs
• No New Editions – course content does not need to be adjusted because the
textbook underwent an edition revision
• Professional Development – learning in copyright, licensing, and information
literacy*
• Can be modified for accessibility*
* Content of this bullet is from How to Use Open Educational Resources Training by SBCTC, CC BY 4.0

3. Challenges
• Quality Assurance – Many OER documents are not well vetted for quality*
• Sustainability – Grant funds often start projects, but then they must find a
sustainability plan to prevent the projects from disappearing*
• Accessibility – It is very common for OER documents to lack the accessibility
support, this can require students to need higher-touch accommodations*
• Finding OER – With many repositories and limited coordination, locating OER
can require a significant time investment
• Non-revocable nature of licenses – Once a work is released with a CC license the
work can continue to be used under the terms of the license, regardless of
changing opinions of creator.*
* Content of this bullet is from How to Use Open Educational Resources Training by SBCTC, CC BY 4.0

4. Open Educational
Resources (OER)
BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES
By: Tyler L. Wallace