Benefits and Challenges of Using OER
Benefits for Students
One of the first aspects of OER to be praised by the general public was the cost savings that they could bring to students. As Figure 1 shows, the price of college textbooks has risen greatly over the past 35 years, outpacing all other consumer goods in the Consumer Price Index by a great margin.
The cost of textbooks might not be a major issue on its own, but it can be an insurmountable hurdle for students already struggling to get by. As a recent survey found, 36% of college students are food insecure. VCU students suffer similarly in food insecurity as a recent study from the VCU School of Social Work associate professor Youngmi Kim, Ph.D., it was estimated “that 33% of VCU students experience food insecurity. That’s nearly 10,000 students.”
Food and housing insecurity among college students exist because of a variety of societal inequities and cannot be fixed by adjusting the price of textbooks alone. However, the unexpected additional cost of textbooks can make the difference between a student persisting in college or dropping out.
In the following video, VCU students share the positive impact free and affordable course materials have had on their experience at VCU:
Inclusion and Representation
A 2019 study by Gopalan and Brady notes that “Racially minoritized and first-generation students at four-year institutions are less inclined to feel that same sense of belonging compared to their peers at two-year institutions.” VCU is a Minority Serving Institution with a student population that has a high proportion of both BIPOC and low-income students. The unique socioeconomic make-up of our community makes fostering a sense of belonging critical to ensure our students succeed.
In addition to offering affordability, open educational resources offer the opportunity to customize and create resources that are reflective of the lived experiences and identities of the students you teach.
Access to a Quality Education
When you choose to share course materials openly, you are providing students with the opportunity to engage with your content before, during, and after your course. Because OER are always free to access online, students who are interested in taking a course you teach can read up on the course ahead of time and ensure that they are ready and interested in the material. Moreover, students who have already taken your course can be safe in the knowledge that their course materials will not evaporate at the end of the semester and that they can continue to review the materials you provided to them for years to come.
The students who benefit from access to OER are not just the ones in your classroom. Unlike affordability initiatives like course reserves, OER are free for anyone in the world to access, whether they have a college affiliation or not. This encourages aging learners and students outside of a formal university setting to explore educational content without having to commit the time and money they might not have to attend college.
Benefits for Instructors
Although cost savings are a major talking point in favor of adopting open educational resources, instructors can utilize OER effectively without replacing paid resources at all. In fact, the freedom to adapt OER to instructional needs is often the most attractive aspect of OER. Since OER are openly licensed, educators are free to edit, reorder, and remix OER materials in many ways.
Use, Improve, and Share
- Adapt and revise resources that have already been created to fit your course syllabus.
- Create an updated second edition of an existing OER.
- Tailor resources to fit your specific course context (e.g., translation, local examples).
Network and Collaborate with Peers
- Access educational resources that have been peer-reviewed by experts in your field.
- Create a new open educational resource with a team of your peers.
- Explore user reviews for a more in-depth understanding of the resources available.
Lower Costs to Improve Access to Information
- Enable all students to have equal access to your course materials.
- Provide students with the opportunity to explore course content before enrolling.
If you want to read more about VCU faculty’s experiences with OER, you can click through the OER Stories series on the library blog.
Challenges of Using OER
There are many benefits to using OER in the classroom; however, there are also some drawbacks. The biggest challenge that instructors face when adopting OER is best encapsulated by the phrase “availability may vary.”
Subject Availability
Many of the largest OER projects funded over the past fifteen years targeted high cost, high impact courses to save students money. Because of this, most of the OER available today are for general education courses such as Psychology, Biology, and Calculus.
This does not mean that there are no OER available for specialized subject areas or graduate-level courses; however, there are more resources to choose from for instructors who teach Introduction to Psychology than for those who teach Electronic Systems Integration for Agricultural Machinery & Production Systems. The good news is, more OER become available every day, and this is beginning to change as more institutions begin publishing OER through regional and institutional grant programs.
Format & Material Type Availability
As with subject availability, the format and types of OER that have been developed over time have largely been targeted at high enrollment courses which could see substantial cost savings for students. There are many open textbooks available today, but fewer options for ancillary materials. You can find lecture slides, notes, and lesson plans online, but ancillary content such as homework software and test banks are harder to find.
Time & Support Availability
Although the other challenges to OER use are inherent to the resources themselves, this final drawback is a concern for you as a user and creator. It takes time and effort to find OER that might work for your course, and if you want to create and publish new resources, that takes exponentially more time. Time constraints are always going to be an issue for instructors who want to try something new in their course, but the library and your Open Educational Resources Librarian are here to help!
Key Takeaways
- OER presents benefits to both instructors and learners, including free access to information, improved representation of a diverse range of experiences and identities in the content, and customization to the course needs.
- Challenges of switching to OER include the availability of niche or higher-level subjects, the availability of some preferred formats and material types, and the time needed to adapt a course to OER.
Sources
Romo, Vanessa. “Hunger and Homelessness are Widespread Among College Students, Survey Finds.” NPR: The Two-Way, April 2018. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/03/599197919/hunger-and-homelessness-are-widespread-among-college-students-study-finds
Weinstein, Dina. “Marking its first decade – and reopening in new space – Ram Pantry continues serving food-insecure students at VCU” VCU News, October 20th, 2023 https://news.vcu.edu/article/2023/10/marking-its-first-decade-ram-pantry-continues-serving-food-insecure-students-at-vcu
Gopalan, M., & Brady, S. T. (2020). College Students’ Sense of Belonging: A National Perspective. Educational Researcher, 49(2), 134-137. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X19897622
This chapter was adapted from The OER Starter Kit by Abbey K. Elder, licensed CC BY 4.0. The Benefits for Instructors section of this chapter was adapted from the SUNY OER Community Course, licensed CC BY 4.0.
