Open Educational Resources: Benefits and Challenges
OERs have a number of benefits compared to more traditional education resources.
- No restrictions: in preparing a lesson plan or looking for reading material, teachers might find excellent material that that want to share. However, this might be behind a paywall or the material may be under copyright. These limitations will prevent sharing and use. OERs are made to share and redistribute with no worries about permissions or copyright infringement
- Free: Replacing textbooks with OERs can mean significant cost savings for students and for academic libraries
- Tailored: OERs are bespoke rather than off-the-shelf, they can be designed for use on specific courses or modules and therefore need not contain any fat in the form of irrelevant material.
- Dynamic: Textbooks present information in a static format. New information requires new editions. Since the majority of OERs are "born digital", i.e., are created in an electronic format, they can be easily updated and revised as required.
- Adaptable: OERs need not be created from scratch; OER licences usually allow derivatives and adaptations, so teachers can tweak material that doesn't quite fit. For example, here are a number of open textbooks written for Canadian electrical apprentices. They can be reused outside of Canada but wouldn't be relevant in countries or regions that use, for example, different wiring standards. However, they are licenced for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (except where otherwise noted) which means they can be adapted for reuse; you could simply replace the Canadian-specific content with content more appropriate for use where you are, making the textbook relevant to your course and your students
- Promote collaboration with other educators: there is huge opportunity for inter-institution collaborations. It makes sense for educational institutions - at all levels to collaborate to create OERs for the subjects they teach in common.
- Promote equity through increased access to knowledge: OERs aid not only students, but anyone interested in learning.
- Promote diversity by being adapted to specific cultural or local circumstances
- Promote inclusion by having other people - including learners - contribute to a resource
- Promote engagement by being adapted so that students recognise themselves and their experiences in a resource
- Promote student success: There are many studies (for example, Hilton 2020) indicating that students using OERs achieve the same, or better, outcomes while spending far less money on textbooks
- Promote student retention. Research also suggests that the use of OERs promotes student retention, with less withdrawals from courses that use OERs (Fischer et al 2015)
OERs are good for educators and others, but do not happen by magic. There are some challenges and obstacles to overcome.
- Time: adapting and authoring OERs can be time consuming
- Quality: OERs are produced mainly by educators and may lack copy-editing, proofing and design support. OERs may also lack peer-review
- Intellectual property: Copyright is a complicated process and open licencing may be tricky, particularly when third party content is introduced
- Marketing and Promotion: OERs are not as well known or well used as commercial offerings and lack the marketing and promotional resources available to commercial suppliers.
- Permanence: Information comes and goes from the web: Management of OERs must include consideration of archiving and storage, especially if learners - or others - want access to the content after the course has finished
- Sustainability: Just as puppies are for life and not just Christmas, once you create a shared resource, you should ensure that there is some mechanism in place to maintain it.
- Belief: you create a resource for use for your learners but may be unwilling to share it over quality or other concerns. But if you're sharing with your learners, isn't your resource of sufficient quality in of itself (or, if not, why not?)?
References
Fischer, L., Hilton, J., Robinson, T.J., and Wile, D.A. (2015) A multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students. J Comput. High Educ 27, 159–172 (2015). Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-015-9101-x [Last accessed 27/04/2021]
Hilton, J. (2020) Open educational resources, student efficacy, and user perceptions: a synthesis of research published between 2015 and 2018. Educational Technology Research and Development 68 (3) p 853-876 Available at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11423-019-09700-4 [Last accessed 27.04.2021]
