In Module 1, we covered why OER is valuable and beneficial. Now we will discuss some of the issues or problems that might arise when you begin working in the open.

Below is an excerpt from an interview with Dave Cormier and Helen Keegan where they discuss some of the issues with OER that they’ve come across:

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 also means that 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.

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. Sometimes specialized subject OERs are located in subject-specific databases, and you might need to do some more intensive searching to find them.

Ownership

OER requires a huge paradigm shift and attitude change and this is a much bigger challenge than introducing a new tool or knowledge. Many in education do not understand the potential of OER and feel that it threatens their ownership of intellectual property. It takes some time to understand that open licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses, clearly recognize and can reinforce someone’s intellectual ownership. The open licenses are simply to make the sharing process easy while protecting the copyright.

Hampson (2013) has suggested that a reason for the slow adoption of OER is to do with the professional self-image of many faculty. Hampson argues that faculty don’t see themselves as ‘just’ teachers, but creators and disseminators of new or original knowledge. Therefore their teaching needs to have their own stamp on it, which makes them reluctant to openly incorporate or ‘copy’ other people’s work. OER can easily be associated with ‘packaged’, reproductive knowledge, and not original work, changing faculty from ‘artists’ to ‘artisans’. It can be argued that this reason is absurd – we all stand on the shoulders of giants – but it is the self-perception that’s important, and for research professors, there is a grain of truth in the argument. It makes sense for them to focus their teaching on their own research.

Quality assurance

A growing number of digital resources are available. Teachers, students and self-learners looking for resources will not have trouble finding resources but might have a harder time judging their quality and relevance. Many institutions that supply OER go through an internal review process before releasing them to the public but these processes are not open in the sense that the user of the resource can follow them (text from Open Educational Resources by Jan Hylen, CC-BY) [PDF]. Whether the material is free or expensive, quality does matter.

The main criticism of OERs is of the poor quality of many of the OER available at the moment – reams of text with no interaction, often available in PDFs that cannot easily be changed or adapted, crude simulation, poorly produced graphics, and designs that fail to make clear what academic concepts they are meant to illustrate.

Sustainability

Many OER initiatives begun in recent years were dependent on one-time start-up funding. Although some projects have a strong institutional backing, it is likely that the initial funding will cease after a few years and maintaining the resources will be difficult and expensive. Without maintenance the resources will become obsolete and the quality could be lost. Therefore it is critical to figure out how to sustain these initiatives in the long run.

Technology

A key component of open is that resources are shared freely online. However, being online means that there is a requirement for students to have technology capable of accessing the OER. As covered in Module 3, being able to access the OER goes beyond basic internet access. To make an OER truly accessible to students of varying degrees of ability there is more reliance on technology to make sure videos are captioned, images have alt text, multiple file types are provided, etc.

Technology can also depreciate over time as software and hardware gets updated or discontinued. For example, Adobe Flash was discontinued in 2020 and is no longer usable in web browsers so any Flash-based OERs are no longer easily accessible.

Repository servers hosting OERs can also be taken offline, which is why archiving and preservation is an important thing to consider when choosing where to share an OER.

Time

Although many challenges to OER use are inherent to the resources themselves, this 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 courses. It is much easier for overworked faculty to use a fully packaged learning resource from an established publisher that includes ancillary resources, assessment tools, etc., and have students pay the cost as a part of their textbook fees. Additionally, as open becomes more popular within an institution the growing institutional expectation of creating and sharing OER can potentially be a way to exploit un-tenured, part-time, or already overworked faculty.

Module quiz

Test your knowledge about challenges in open.

Summary

Adaptation statements

This module adapted content from:

• The OER Starter Kit by Abbey K. Elder, licensed under a CC-BY
• Teaching in a Digital Age by Anthony William (Tony) Bates, licensed under CC-BY-NC
• Module 10: Why OER Matters by Open Washington, licensed under CC-BY