I purposely waited until the final module to ask this question: why on earth do we care? Why do open educational resources matter? What is the point of using OER?
The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to curb the commodification of knowledge and provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm (sentence from Wikipedia, OER). As an educator, what benefits do you see in using OER for you and your students?
Below are some of the benefits of using open educational resources that I have seen while working with OER over the past several years.
OER can offer drastic savings in the cost of education. Some students, who otherwise cannot afford to buy expensive textbooks or other course materials, will appreciate this affordable option when taking your course. A faculty member from a community college said during an interview
“Many of my students are struggling. They are working adults trying to make ends meet. I used to use a $150 textbook from a publisher and I switched to an open textbook. My students love it because it costs nothing. They are now asking if my next course will use the free textbook too.”
“I made my own course materials package for my students. It is free to download and a printed version is only 40 dollars. I could not find a ready-made open textbook for my course. So I combined the open resources out there and developed my own. It was a lot of work, but my students are happy to save good money.”
There are more than 1000 free online courses from leading universities that are open to the public. Students in low-resource environments can enjoy the recorded lectures and video tutorials developed by other institutions such as,
Open Yale courses (from Yale University),
Webcast.Berkeley (from the University of California at Berkeley),
Stanford Engineering Everywhere (from Stanford University),
Open Learning Initiative (from Carnegie Mellon University)
MIT OpenCourseWare (from MIT)
Open Learning Initiative (from Carnegie Mellon University)
Harvard Open Courses at Harvard Extension School (from Harvard University)
This is just to name a few. Many other universities, colleges, and other educational institutions in higher education are preparing to offer open online courses to the public. Educators are happily sharing their life’s work with students and enjoying the greater influence their materials have on larger audiences.
If an instructor opens his/her own course materials, and shares them with the public it greatly enhances opportunities for learning for both students who already took the course and the prospective students.
Students often would like to look over course materials before the term begins. If students have that opportunity to take a look at the course materials it will help them make more informed decisions in choosing their courses, and will give them the opportunity to prepare themselves for the class.
Students also would like to revisit their course materials after the quarter/semester is over to refresh their memories or to further study the topics. Open course materials will help them reinforce what they have learned and further develop their level of understanding in the area.
If you’re re-using someone else’s materials, one of the best reasons for using OER is for peace of mind about attribution. The resources are licensed to allow the sharing of content and so you will not need to contact the author about making use of his or her work provided that what you want to do falls within the ‘open’ license. OERs are free at the point of use, so you will not need to provide monetary compensation for using them. Then there is the opportunity of discovering alternative ideas for presenting and teaching your subject matter or being able to point your students to the alternative explanations for further study (text in this paragraph is from Why OER by Kabils, CC BY).
• Showcases research to widest possible audience
• Enhances a school’s reputation as well as that of the teacher or researcher
• Social responsibility – provides education for all
• Shares best practice internationally
• Creates additional opportunities for peer review
• Maximizes the use and increases availability of educational materials
• Raises the quality standards for educational resources by gathering more contributors
What do you see? Do they make sense? Think about what OER can do for you and your students.
Below are some of the challenges of using/providing open educational resources.
A growing number of digital resources are available. Teachers, students and self-learners looking for resources will not have trouble finding resources but might have a harder time judging their quality and relevance. Many institutions that supply OER go through an internal review process before releasing them to the public but these processes are not open in the sense that the user of the resource can follow them (text from Open Educational Resources by Jan Hylen, CC-BY). Also there is a lack of research data focusing on comparing the amount students learn from OER compared to the amount they learn from prevailing publisher materials. Whether the material is free or expensive, quality does matter.
Many OER initiatives begun in recent years were dependent on one-time start-up funding. Although some projects have a strong institutional backing, it is likely that the initial funding will cease after a few years and maintaining the resources will be difficult and expensive. Without maintenance the resources will become obsolete and the quality could be lost. Therefore it is critical to figure out how to sustain these initiatives in the long run.
At just over ten years old OER is a very recent development in education. It requires a huge paradigm shift and attitude change and this is a much bigger challenge than introducing a new tool or knowledge. Many in education do not understand the potential of OER and feel that it threatens their ownership of intellectual property. It takes some time to understand that open licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses, clearly recognize and can reinforce someone’s intellectual ownership. The open licenses are simply to make the sharing process easy while protecting the copyright.
Below are presentation slides that discuss the benefits and challenges of OER prepared by Washington State Community and Technical College faculty.
"Module 10: Why OER Matters" by Open Washington https://www.openwa.org/module-10/ CC BY 4.0