Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely available educational materials that can be used without copyright restrictions. OERs come in many formats including textbooks, videos, and games. They cover a wide range of subjects from K-12 to higher education. Some key benefits of OER include free access and use, cost savings, easy updating of materials, and opportunities for customization. However, OER also present some challenges such as difficulty selecting high-quality materials from the vast options, ensuring acceptable academic rigor, and lack of availability for some specialized topics. Overall, while still new, OER are expected to become increasingly important educational resources.

1. Open Educational Resources:
their benefits and challenges
By
Dr. Siri Nimal Wickramaratne
Clark College, Vancouver, WA
swickramaratne@clark.edu
Image credit: UNESCO – Public domain

2. Introduction
• Open Educational Resources[OER] are materials available for
free use without copyright restrictions.
• They are available on the Web for learning, teaching and even
research.
• Any educational resource even in non-digital is form qualifies as
an OER provided its free to use.
• They are found in may formats; course material, course plans,
textbooks, videos and games to name a few.
• They also cover an extremely wide variety of subjects as well as
level from schools to graduate schools.

3. Cont’d
• OERs can either be in;
“the public domain or released with an intellectual property license
that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution”.
[UNESCO - Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-
knowledge/open-educational-resources//]
mage credit: UNESCO – Public Domain

4. Benefits of OER
OER has many benefits and some are:
• 1. Free availability without the need to worry about copyright issues.
• Even for-profit educational institutions will have access to most of
these.
• 2. Free availability without a financial cost.
• 3. Massive new information allows educators as well as students to
remain in the frontier of knowledge with continual updating.

5. Cont’d
• 4. Provide opportunity to combine data and information from many
sources to produce comprehensive and composite products.
• 5. Wide coverage for individual or inter-disciplinary subjects.
• 6. Openness helps elevate standards through peer-review.
• 7. OER saves time and energy and even trouble.
• 8. Flexibility and adaptability to different circumstances.

6. Challenges of OER
OER are not without challenges and some are:
1. The Challenge of selection from among many. [Decision making
challenge]
2. The challenge of searching. Wide availability poses a challenge as
to where to look for material that suits one’s needs.
3. Quality issue. As relatively new, quality of OER can be questionable.
[Question of acceptable academic resources. Usually, material from
universities/colleges and reputed agencies are beyond doubt].

7. Cont’d
• 4. Desired material is not plentiful for every subject. Some of my
colleagues found this challenge.
• 5. OERs are relatively new having [originated in 1994]. Therefore,
OER literacy is low and so is their credibility as of now.
• 6. At the college and research level new research findings are no
available as OERs. Peer-reviewed journal are not in the OER world.

8. Conclusion
OER is a relatively new concept.
People in every sphere of education will find them indispensable
in the years to come.
Thank you!
Image Credit: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration Public domain