OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OER): BENEFITS AND CHALLENGESSTEFANIE KRUPP

ADJUNCT INSTRUCTOR, GENERAL NUTRITION

CLARK COLLEGE, VANCOUVER, WA

OER Global Logo by Jonathas Mello is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Unported 3.0 License

5 BENEFITS (1-3 FOR STUDENTS)

1. Especially for online courses, students do not have to worry about purchasing a textbook (if it replaces the textbook)

2. Reduces expense for students, not only for the textbook, but for storage space! When I was in college I had to buy a large bookshelf to accommodate all of my science textbooks.

3. Many students sell their textbook back anyway, and no longer have it as a reference. With open educational resources, students may have access to the resource for much longer.

5 BENEFITS CONT. (4-5 FOR EDUCATORS)

4. Creating OER content helps distinguish a faculty member as an authoritative source, which can benefit their career in many ways.

5. Saves a faculty member time in developing content on your own if you can find good open source or public domain material

4+5 = Potential collaboration if there is material that could use updating and the existing author on one of these OER platforms is not able to make updates but the OER source really should be updated.

5 CHALLENGES

1. Material may not stay updated2. Links may disappear so you need to recheck them before using them each

term3. Material may not really speak to your intended purpose (e.g. using biology

text for nutrition may provide unnecessary depth)4. Students might prefer to have a printed resource and the format the

instructor chose does not easily lend itself to printing (use of videos – transcript may not seem as helpful)

5. Licensing could be ignored and your work could be modified when you did not want it to be.

CONCLUSIONS

• Very beneficial to know about OER and its proper use.

• Also great to know we can develop our own.

" graffiti trein Hollands Spoor" by Gerard Stolk is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0