A brief overview of the benefits and disadvantages of OER.

1. Pros and cons of
Open Education
Resources (OERs)
by Linnea Vose
May 18, 2018

2. What are OERs?
 “Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any
type of educational materials that are in the
public domain or introduced with an open
license. The nature of these open materials
means that anyone can legally and freely
copy, use, adapt and re-share them.”
-Definition from the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

3. The benefits of OERs
 Freely available
 Knowledge is made available to everyone, including poverty
stricken and working adults with other monetary commitments
 Reaches a wide audience
 Individuals with no access to school (lack of money or time)
can still study topics of interest without the stress of a formal
class setting
 Various modalities
 Knowledge is provided in a variety of methods (recorded
lectures, animated videos, diagrams, digital text books)
allowing people with different learning styles to better access
the information
 Current material
 OERs can be published as soon as they are prepared, while the
editorial process for text books can take years, so they can be
out of date when first published (especially biology books)
 Can be modified
 Part of the “open” of OERs allows instructors (and students) to
draw from a variety of sources to gather the material they are
interested in learning

4. The downside of OER
 Internet access required
 Not everyone has internet at home, and their location or time
commitments (work, family) may impede their access to
internet cafes (ie: school or public libraries)
 What if the link changes? Webpages get rearrange, and links to
materials will become useless
 Quality control
 Most resources have minimal to no editorial phase, so may
contain factual errors
 Inconsistencies in open-ness
 Some providers have more restrictions on the use of their
resources, yet are still called “OERs” (for now)
 People are unaware
 Most people don’t realize OERs are even available
 Reputation
 Many people have the idea that expensive materials are
“better” than free ones

5. Conclusion
 OERs are still relatively new
 Many variables of access and permissions should
work themselves out over time
 Perhaps a rating system or notation could be worked
out to clarify the editorial process involved prior to
publication (to inform the reader without
significantly increasing time to publication)
 “Peer review” is one of the hallmarks of
scientific literature, and it would be
unfortunate to lose that process
 OERs have amazing potential to disseminate
information to wide audiences and should be
utilized for this purpose