The document discusses the benefits and challenges of open educational resources (OER). The benefits for students include lower costs, additional support materials, and access to varied perspectives. Benefits for instructors are ensuring all students have materials, enhancing courses with free materials, and accessing extra resources. Challenges for students are preferring one textbook, unfamiliarity with OER and copyright, and potential confusion from multiple sources. Challenges for instructors consist of the time to find resources, copyright concerns, difficulty locating high-quality relevant materials, and having too many resources to search through.

1. OER
Benefits and Challenges
CC BY-NC 2.5
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/

2. BENEFITS
Students
• Lower Costs
• Provided with additional support materials
• Access to a variety of perspectives on topic
Instructors
• All students have the course materials
• Ability to enhance course with free materials
• Access to additional course materials and media

3. CHALLENGES
Students
• May prefer having one textbook – traditional style of courses
• Unfamiliar with OER and copyright issues
• OER courses may seem confusing with many sources of information
Instructors
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Time Consuming to find resources
Copyright Concerns
Difficult to find high-quality, relevant resources
Too many resources to search through