Open Educational Resources

Expanding opportunities for education

(Summary by Holly Hill)

• Open Educational Resources offer free access to a wide variety of educational materials though the web. They are available through the public domain or through an open license for people to use and re-purpose.

OER

Why Use Open Educational Resources

• 1) They are democratic: available for free to everyone who has internet access

• 2) They provide an expansive educational arena with courses available from esteemed universities such as Yale, MIT, Berkeley, and more

• 3) They help make education more affordable to students when teachers use OERs instead of expensive textbooks

• 4) They offer helpful and creative supplemental material for instructors, from images to study guides, course content, and videos

• 5) They allow constant updating of material with current content

• 6) They allow instructors to share teaching materials without worrying about copyright

Challenges With OERs• 1) They can be time-consuming to research

• 2) OERs don’t have enough quality content (courses) available for all fields and classes to consider replacing textbooks

• 3) As they are still relatively new, they are not well-enough supported by most educational institutions, so instructors are often working on their own to implement these resources

• 4) It’s time-consuming to attribute correct open-license or Creative-Commons licensing to each thing used

• 5) OERs may come and go without notice on the web

The Take-away From an Instructor’s View

• Open Educational Resources represent an exciting new development in education for teachers, students, and those with access to the web. While the challenges of being time-consuming to find, develop, and maintain are real, they offer the opportunity for supplemental, more engaging, and cheaper educational resources. In some cases they may replace textbooks– I haven’t quite come to this point as a teacher, but others have.