Using Open Educational

Resources

Benefits and Challenges of OER in classroom instruction

Why use OER?

● Free to students (and instructors too!)

● Open access to reach more students

● Can provide valuable supplemental material to classroom instruction

● No worries about whether material may be used if the material is clearly OER

● “Crowd sourcing” education allows collaboration and peer review

Some challenges

● Open access can mean quality assurance is more difficult

● Requires a great deal of resources to sustain and maintain

● Careful use of OER can be time-consuming for instructors

● Information overload?

Things to consider

● How do you want to use OER? What’s your purpose?

● What can OER do for you and your students?