Open Educational Resources: Why Use OER?

There are many reasons instructors might want to use OER: 

Free and Legal to Use, Improve, and Share

• Save time and energy by adapting or revising resources that have already been creating
• Tailoring educational resources to the specific content for your course
• Expands opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching and learning by allowing instructors to integrate and revise multiple educational resources
• Redefines "traditional" learning by often incorporating multi-media or scenario-based education
• Allows instructor to go beyond the confines of "teaching to the book"

Network and Collaborate with Peers 

• Access to educational resources that have already been "peer reviewed" by other experts in your field
• Many resources have a review or annotation feature so instructors have more in-depth knowledge of the resource and its quality quickly
• Makes learning and teaching more collaborative

Lower Educational Cost and Improve Access to Information

• Reduces the cost of course materials, particularly textbooks so that all students have access and aren't as financially burdened
• Find and access information instantly on virtually any topic, and can access with various devices.
• Gives learners the option of looking at course content openly before enrolling.
• Can reduce the load students bear, sometimes increasing graduation and retention rates

Hoping to learn more? There have been multiple studies on faculty implementations, misunderstandings, acceptance of, and evaluation of OER. The Review Project has curated a number of empirical studies published in scholarly journals on the topic. Their general conclusion is: 

Once adopted, OER provide the permissions necessary for faculty to engage in a wide range of pedagogical innovations. In each of the studies reported above, OER were used in manner very similar to the traditional textbooks they replaced. We look forward to reviewing empirical articles describing the learning impacts of open pedagogies.