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Benefits of OER
• Affordable
• Collaboration
• Retention
• Professional Development
• Versatility
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Affordable • Open education resources can reduce the cost of
course materials for students
• Removing the cost of textbooks helps address equity
issues for low-income and first-generation students
facing financial barriers and stressors regarding school
costs.
• Students may be more likely to take a course without
textbook cost.
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Collaboration • Depending on the resource license, the
instructor can adjust the course materials
based on the course needs.
• Instructors can work together to share or
develop materials.
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Retention • Students can revisit the course materials
whenever they need to.
• OERs are sometimes updated, which means
that the student could be viewing the most
up-to-date version.
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Professional
Development • It’s important to understand copyright,
licensing, and information literacy. This is a
skill that will be valuable for teaching and
beyond. Learning about OERs is important
because you want to make sure you are
crediting the authors of the materials that
you are using.
• Knowing how to use OERs can help with
your career.
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Versatility • There are many courses and textbooks
available. This allows students to read and
understand from different perspectives.
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Challenges of OER
• Quality: It is time-consuming to determine what is a high-quality resource.
• Accessibility: OERs can be easily accessed online but often, they might not be accessible to
students that use screen readers or for students that don’t have internet.
• Lack of Support: Using OERs may be time-consuming when an instructor is creating and
evaluating various OERs for their courses.
• Lack of funding: Authors might not want to write textbooks if there is no compensation for their
hours of work.
• Not enough knowledge: OERs are not talked about enough. Many do not know that there are
many different resources online that are free to students and instructors.
