This is a short PPT discussing the pros and cons of OER for students as well as instructors

1. OER Resources
The Pros and ConsPhebe Shen
Everett Community College
OER 101
Winter 2015

2. Why OER?
For students:
• OER provides access to courses that students
may not otherwise be able to take, effectively
creating more equity
• OER breaks down one of the major barriers to
student learning, which is the high cost of
textbooks
• OER enables students to have continued access
to course materials; they don’t have to worry about
getting behind at the start of the quarter or no
longer having the information due to having to
return or sell the book back

3. For instructors and other
contributors
 OER allows for greater creativity and community as
materials including photos, lesson plans, and even
classes are shared and remixed and redistributed
 OER, through the use of creative commons licensing,
allows people to still maintain some rights to their
work, but to share more widely than copyright laws
would have allowed
 OER allows instructors to not have to worry about
students not having materials or to stress out about
publishing companies constantly issuing new editions
of textbooks (for disciplines where the information
does not change radically from year to year)

4. Why not OER?
For students:
 OER like MOOCs, which cannot replicate the
classroom learning environment with the real-time
dynamics that occur between instructors and
students, take a lot of discipline and maturity to
accomplish have a high rate of incompletion
 OER often are highly dependent on technology
and some students may not have the necessary
resources or skills

5. For instructors:
 OER are still not that common for all disciplines
and it can take a long time to find the right
resources for your course
 OER allows some attribution and rights through
creative commons licensing but does not provide
any monetary compensation for the time and effort
people put into developing resources