Benefits and Challenges of Open Educational Resources

1. Open Educational
Resources
BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES
DIANE O’NEILL, SOUTH PUGET SOUND COMMUNITY COLLEGE

2. Background
This presentation was developed to satisfy part
of the requirements for the course “How to Use
Open Educational Resources (OER)”, offered
Winter Quarter 2015 by Washington Online, part
of The Washington State Board for Community
and Technical Colleges.

3. Open Educational Resources (OER)
• OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside
in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual
property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by
others.
• Open educational resources include full courses, course
materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests,
software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to
support access to knowledge.
Definition by Hewlett Foundation link is licensed under Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 link

4. Benefits
• Increases access to learning
• Lowers cost to students
• Facilitates collaboration among colleagues
• Allows students to learn from leading universities
• Promotes timely incremental updates to materials

5. Challenges
• Maintaining the quality of materials
• Finding desired OER materials within the resources available
• Motivating instructors to share resources
• Alleviating language barriers for languages other than English
• Changing technology that may render prior materials obsolete