1. S
The Key Benefits and Challenges of
Using Open Educational Resources:
One Person’s Opinion
Prepared By:
Dora Summers-Ewing
Olympic College
July 11, 2015

2. What is OER?
S According to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation -
S "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 and
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."

3. Key Benefits
S Saves students money because these are free materials!
S Provides students resources from a number of well known educational
institutions ( i.e., MIT, Yale, Harvard) without having to attend them.
S High quality materials! Increases student retention of material presented.
S Sources are potentially more timely and up to date than existing textbooks.
S Provides a wide variety of materials that will appeal to all types of learners:
visual, auditory, kinesthetic.
S Easy for teachers to gain access to these materials – both plentiful and easy to
use as a result of Creative Commons licenses.
S It’s the moral thing to do – give everyone access to free education.

4. Key Challenges
S Educating the world’s teachers, instructors and professors about the availability of
these resources.
S Requires teachers to learn something new or change the way they are teaching
today. Hence, not every teacher will choose this option.
S Sustainability of the archives currently storing OER (in case of funding cuts or lack of
grants).
S Finding cost effective ways to translate these sources into other needed languages.
S Creative Commons licenses are completely non-revocable.
S Quality – You don’t want to wade through garbage to get to a gem. Rather you
should be able to expect them all to be gems if they are being offered to the public.