Considerations (straw dog)

Open Educational Resources offer some great benefits and opportunities over total inhouse development and/or purchase of "closed" resources:

• OER provide freedom of access for both yourself and others.
• Because you can freely adapt them, OER encourage pedagogical innovation.
• Because OER are generally available free of charge, using them can, in some situations, lower costs to students and organizations.
• You and your organization may benefit from potential publicity.
• When you share OER, you are contributing to the global education community.
• When you share OER, you open a new method of collaborating with your students and colleagues.
• Your OER will be helpful to future educators.
• Your OER may be beneficial to underserved individuals in the developed and developing world.
• Using OERs puts you in control and avoids "vendor lock" or a situation in which you can only use one company's products.
• OER are represented in standard formats that can be edited and manipulated with free software for a wide variety of reasons including file conversion for access on different media (e.g. on paper, CD/DVD, via mobile devices, in multimedia presentations), re-purposing for various language and educational levels, etc..

However, when embarking on an OER project, be it a small scale attempt to use OER in some course, or a large scale institutional initiative to create and share OER, there are some considerations:

• As with free and open source software, volunteer contributions are significant, often by a diversity of people with limited time and institutional support.
  • As a user:
    • Check for completeness, appropriateness for your context and quality:
      • OER created by someone else may need a significant amount of customization before they work in your local context.
  • As a producer:
    • Creating, adapting, and sharing OER requires either time, financial, talent or other resources which may be difficult to find and coordinate.
    • Get support from the upper echelons of your institution.
    • Invest in the necessary resources to support the initiative including:
      • Startup funds
      • ICT support to manage servers, security including vandalism and spam, privacy, etc.
      • A small team to manage quality and check legality (copyright, accessibility and other requirements) of resources before approving for publishing.
      • Marketing and Communications.
      • etc. - see the Handbook for Institutions.
    • Reward contributors.
• OER typically requires Internet access (ideally high-speed), which is not always available and may restrict participation.
• Technical requirements for using OER vary and some require you to use a particular piece of software.

• If you want to include "closed" material in your OER, obtaining copyright clearance from the owner can be difficult and expensive.
• Your institution may be concerned about 'giving away' educational materials created by you and other employees, and Policymakers may not embrace the use of OER.
  • Have them read the handbook for Policy Makers.