1 Step One: What Are OER, Why Are They Important, and What are the Barriers to A
1 Step One: What Are OER, Why Are They Important, and What are the Barriers to Adoption?
What Are OER, Why Are They Important, and What are the Barriers to Adoption?
What are OER?
Open Education Resources (OER) can be any type of educational material: their scale varies from something as small as a class handout or image to something as large as a textbook or online course. While traditional course resources come with restrictive copyright laws, OER use open copyright licenses like Creative Commons. Depending on the creator’s desires, these licenses allow for different degrees of openness, and may restrict or preclude users from engaging in one or more of the 5Rs.
According to David Wiley’s definition of openness, OER are “licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:
- Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
- Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
- Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
- Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
- Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)”
Why are OER important? Cost Savings.
For students already struggling to afford rising tuition and housing costs, the additional expense of textbooks can be a hurdle to accessing higher education. In a study conducted by Florida Virtual Campus in 2012, 65% of respondents indicated that they did not purchase textbooks at one point in their schooling due to cost. The same survey also indicated that 35% of students reduced their semesterly course load due to textbook cost and that 23% of students regularly forego purchasing textbooks due to cost alone. According to a Consumer Study conducted by NBC in 2015, from January 1977 to June 2015 textbook prices within the United States have risen 1,041%; this amount has risen over three times the rate of U.S. inflation.
While there are many short-term measures that students can use to save money on textbooks, such as buying or borrowing used materials, rental programs, or using e-textbooks and library reserves, none of these options are as innovative as OER. Open educational resources, like open textbooks, can decrease the cost of education because they are either free or low cost. Lower costs will result in students being less dependent on student loans and may even result in higher program completion rates. Greater open textbook adoption will therefore result in a more affordable, more accessible post-secondary education.
Because their license allows OER to be retained and reused, OER can also be accessed repeate