Open

Education

Resources

The Benefit, Challenges and Opportunities!

By Sandra K. Campbell

Open Education Resources:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible,

openly licensed documents and media that are useful for

teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research

purposes. Although some people consider the use of an open

format to be an essential characteristic of OER, this is not a

universally acknowledged requirement.

The development and promotion of open educational

resources is often motivated by a desire to curb the

commodification of knowledge[1] and provide an alternate or

enhanced educational paradigm.[2] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

OER

Used to gain information, and enhancement of skills and

knowledge or to help with remediation in an area.

Knowledge available for global population use.

Can be self-paced.

Available for teachers use in a classroom as supplemental or

main material on chosen topics.

OER provides an opportunity to share knowledge and

experiences globally.

OER can create interactive experiences.

A means for people to share their expertise on a topic.

Benefits

Global digital divide creates inequality in technology

availability.

The accuracy and validity of the material needs to be

verified.

Knowing where to look to find OERs.

Improving and increasing the number of good quality

OERs in a variety of subject areas.

As technology becomes more advanced will OERs still be

a viable source?

Challenges

Opportunities

As technology improves and more and more people are

able to login to the internet, they will be able to find OERs for

their personal gain of knowledge or as a resource for

educators to supplement or be the complete material source

for a subject.

Many educational institutions are producing OER materials—

they could be educators of how and why OERs are of value.

Technology will become more accessible to the public which

means people will be able to retrieve OERs more readily.

Education will turn more and more to the internet as

technology improves which means well managed and

improved OERs will become needed and necessary.

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