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Open Educational Resources

Presented by Willie Pritchard

De Anza College

June 28, 2007

The Challenges of OER

• Easier to find reasons not to use OER than it is to find reason for using it
• Culture of using commercial content is strong
• Insufficient OER materials available
• Material is often idiosyncratic to the developer of the material (to their needs)
• Quality is suspect in many faculty minds
• Financial reward (or perception thereof) for commercial content; none for OER
• Materials are dated and material is not maintained or updated to kept current
• Content is sometimes dependent on software that becomes outdated or is no longer standards-based
• Articulation agreements are predicated on textbooks

Encouraging Development and Use of OER

• Develop catalog/library of OER materials
• Cover key disciplines/core courses
• Quality is critical to widespread adoption
• Need more institutions to support it
• Need to reward faculty who develop it
• Instill a Culture of OER
• Don’t wear out your “stars”
• OER is more than faculty (Bookstore, library, etc.)

OER and Distance Learning

• Challenges
  • Delivering content “at a distance” is a lot of work
  • Much faculty development and content is inside of closed systems
  • ADA/Section 508 compliance issues
• Opportunities
  • Not as much content for DL by publishers as for traditional delivery
  • Faculty are developing their own content
  • Growing movement for OER

Suggested Solutions

• Institutional
  • Create a widespread understanding among faculty of what OER is (and is not)
  • Create an awareness about the advantages of OER and educate faculty on those advantages
  • Create an infrastructure that supports the creation and use of OER
  • Create a distribution mechanism
  • Dedicate an entity to OER development, support, and use

• Societal
  • Create a critical mass of OER content and content developers
  • Create an infrastructure that supports the creation and use of OER
  • Foundations
  • Proposed legislation
  • Create distribution mechanisms