Briefly summarizes five potential benefits of using OER for universities and five potential drawbacks.

1. Benefits and Challenges of OER
Steve Gance
1/27/2014
CC-By 4.0

2. Primary Benefits of OER for Universities
•
Saves costs for students: College costs are becoming out of reach for many.
Anything that reduces those costs keeps college more affordable.
•
High quality course content is available: It is difficult for most universities and
instructors to provide content of high production value. First tier institutions are
in a better position to provide these resources.
•
Can lead to a shift in the role of the instructor: Taking the focus off of producing
content can focus instruction on helping students learn.
•
Makes wide-ranging learning resources available that allows students to follow
their interests while meeting instructional goals (i.e., taking advantage of what
used to be called “the long tail”)
•
Can increase the recognition of scholarly work by making it much more widely
available without signing away intellectual property rights. Making one’s work open
can enhance one’s academic reputation.

3. Primary Drawbacks of OER for Universities
•
A sustainable model of creating and supporting OER has not been demonstrated.
Most OER projects have been funded by grant money. It is difficult to imagine
most universities funding such projects without a clear return on investment.
•
The sheer number of resources makes it difficult to search and select ones useful
for one’s own class. This is potentially much more time consuming than the
current selection of a course text (which often also includes many electronic
resources of high quality).
•
Updating these resources for new technology and requirements is difficult. For
example, many early OER resources were not developed with Accessibility in
mind. As legal and design elements change, so too should educational materials.
•
As technologies change, it will be more difficult for consumers of OER to
understand the various technical requirements or limitations of the resources
provided, especially resources that are meant to work within LMS’s or other
formal course technologies.
•
Linking to OER is another source of potential problems with broken links or
incompatible content that must be reviewed each time it is to be used.