What OER can bring for us

 

This week's reading has provided a lot of benefits that OER can bring to instruction, which really gives people confidence in OER. However, I think that while we enjoy the benefits of OER, we also need to face many challenges brought by OER. Think twice, I created this summary blog post. I want to summarize some of the benefits that OER can bring to instruction and also list all the challenges of OER that I can think of. If I miss anything, please let me know!

The Benefits of OER:

Free or low-cost: Most open textbooks are free or low-cost, so this greatly reduces students' spending on textbooks.

More likely to succeed: The implementation of OER enables students to freely obtain all the resources needed for study at the beginning of the semester, which makes it more likely for students to succeed in their studies.

Fewer drop-out rates: With OER, students will not drop a course because they cannot afford a textbook or fail to finish a course because they do not have a textbook.

Customization: With OER, teachers will be able to customize their lessons to their own students or their own teaching style.

Updated in real-time: OER involves revising and remixing resources. To this end, teachers will be able to update their teaching materials based on real-time events and information.

Use free: OER is a resource that can be accessed at any time and that has no location requirements. To this end, learners will have access to all teaching resources anytime, anywhere. At the same time, there are no restrictions on how the resources can be viewed so students can view all the resources on a variety of devices.

Lifelong learning: OER empowers students to retain learning resources that they can use to learn at any time throughout their lives.

The Challenges of OER:

Finding appropriate OER: It may take a lot of time to find the right OER because OER does not have a fixed knowledge base. The resources of OER are often distributed on the network, which is difficult to find quickly.

Understanding open licenses: Not everyone is familiar with the concept and rules of Open Licenses. Therefore, schools need to arrange corresponding courses of open licenses for teachers and students using OER to prevent teachers and students from violating the rules of open licenses and other copyright problems.

Technical support for OER: OER involves revising and remixing resources. In this process, the teacher may encounter some technical problems such as photo editing and video editing. At this point, schools will likely need to create departments to provide OER technical support for these teachers.

Change traditional mindsets: OER may make many educators uncomfortable because they may think it is wrong to use other people's work for free. Also, sometimes they choose to protect rather than share their resources. For this reason, it will be challenging to change the traditional mindsets of these people.

Lack of auxiliary materials: Because OER textbooks are still evolving, there are still some flaws in OER textbooks. One drawback is the lack of teacher copies, syllabuses, tests, and other auxiliary resources that many traditional textbooks have. These deficiencies make it difficult for some teachers to abandon traditional textbooks

Update OER in time: One advantage of OER's textbooks is that they can be updated in real-time as time changes. However, this kind of update is actually a time-consuming and energy-consuming thing.