OER ResourcesThe Pros and Cons

Phebe ShenEverett Community College

OER 101Winter 2015

Why OER?For students:

• OER provides access to courses that students

may not otherwise be able to take, effectively

creating more equity

• OER breaks down one of the major barriers to

student learning, which is the high cost of

textbooks

• OER enables students to have continued access

to course materials; they don’t have to worry about

getting behind at the start of the quarter or no

longer having the information due to having to

return or sell the book back

For instructors and other contributors

OER allows for greater creativity and community as materials including photos, lesson plans, and even classes are shared and remixed and redistributed

OER, through the use of creative commons licensing, allows people to still maintain some rights to their work, but to share more widely than copyright laws would have allowed

OER allows instructors to not have to worry about students not having materials or to stress out about publishing companies constantly issuing new editions of textbooks (for disciplines where the information does not change radically from year to year)

Why not OER?For students:

OER like MOOCs, which cannot replicate the

classroom learning environment with the real-time

dynamics that occur between instructors and

students, take a lot of discipline and maturity to

accomplish have a high rate of incompletion

OER often are highly dependent on technology

and some students may not have the necessary

resources or skills

For instructors:

OER are still not that common for all disciplines

and it can take a long time to find the right

resources for your course

OER allows some attribution and rights through

creative commons licensing but does not provide

any monetary compensation for the time and effort

people put into developing resources