A riveting presentation about the benefits and challenges of working with OER materials

1. OER
• The benefits and challenges of OER
A riveting presentation by Curt Moon
"OER" by Curt Moon is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
4.0

2. What is OER?
• The below definition is from the creative commons,
https://creativecommons.org/about/program-areas/education-oer/
• “Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and
research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or
(b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and
perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities.
• Retain – make, own, and control a copy of the resource
• Reuse – use your original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource publicly
• Revise – edit, adapt, and modify your copy of the resource
• Remix – combine your original or revised copy of the resource with other
existing material to create something new
• Redistribute – share copies of your original, revised, or remixed copy of the
resource with others”
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SA-NC

3. Benefits
• Using OER materials have numerous benefits for both student and
instructor
• This is just a small list of 5 benefits and certainly is not an exhaustive
list
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4. Benefit #1: PRICE, PRICE, PRICE!
• Its very hard to beat the price of OER materials
• I can recall quarters in the later 90’s and early 2000’s when my books
would cost upwards of $500
• Not every student has an extra $500 laying around to spend on
learning materials
• OER materials are a great way around the price of learning materials!

5. Benefit #2: Abundance
• There is no shortage of OER materials out there!
• If one thing doesn’t work for you then you can search through many
more
• NOTE: Of course, not every subject will be represented the same.
While searching for biology materials I found a plethora of things. I
searched for “underwater basket weaving” and got nothing…
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6. Benefit #3: Ease of Searching
• We live in the information era for sure and we have a valuable tool
called the internet where we can search for nearly anything.
• This goes along with Benefit #2: Abundance
• Lots of user-friendly places to search for OER materials
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7. Benefit #4: Flexibility of Materials
• You can find OER materials for every level of education
• Most of what I found while searching for biology materials was
geared towards college level learning
• There are early learning resources all the way up to med school
materials available
• SIDE NOTE: Found some great worksheets for my 4 year old so he can keep
those ABC’s sharp over the summer 

8. Benefit #5: You don’t have to reinvent the
wheel!
• The instructor in me loves this the most!
• Why build all your materials from the ground up? That is very time
consuming to do
• Instead, find OER materials that fit your needs or materials you can
tailor to your needs (if that is allowed of course!)
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9. Benefits…don’t exist without challenges…
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10. Challenge #1: Reviewing the material
• I have been asked to review OER texts on a few occasions and it takes
time
• While this isn’t hard it is mind numbing and you can miss important
things that should be addressed before using in the course

11. Challenge #2: Accuracy
• This hasn’t been a huge issue in the OER materials I have used but it
has caused some confusion
• If you miss things from Challenge #1 then your lectures may not
match what the OER materials are saying
• BELIEVE ME, students will find this and let you know!
• This has caused questions on assessments to be tossed out then you
need to make sure you “re-teach” the subject matter
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licensed under CC BY-SA

12. Challenge #3: Choosing the right stuff
• With abundance comes the challenge of choosing the right stuff for your
course
• I have fallen into this pit a few times
• It happens like this: I find this awesome OER material that is perfect (at
least I thought) for the course and low and behold its full of information
that wasn’t taught in the courses leading up to mine (face palm…)
• Learning objectives help to get around this a little bit but I recommend
making sure the class will have the right knowledge to do/use the material.
• NOTE: My sons wanted a mario pic somewhere in this ppt….I am just doing
what I am told…
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NC-ND

13. Challenge 4: Using resources correctly
• I am finding that not all OER materials make this obvious (I wish they
would…)
• Last thing I want to do is do something wrong while using an OER
resource
• Full disclosure: I am super guilty of this. While its easy to find these
great resources, its not always obvious what restrictions they have
• I looked back at a few OER materials I have used and most I did things
right but a few I changed, and I was not supposed to (face palm…)

14. Challenge #5: Learning about OER materials
• Why is this not mandatory?! (No seriously, it should be mandatory…)
• Ignorance is not always a valid excuse, and I will fully say that I was
very ignorant on how OER works (until this course)
• This is sad because I had been using OER materials prior to this course
and not always following the rules (face palm…)
• Since this course (or similar) are not required, it allows users of OER
materials to not always follow the rules
• These rules are not always spelled out and with a simple month-long
course you can figure out how to use them correctly
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under CC BY

15. Final Thoughts
• Over-all I am a huge fan of OER materials
• The price and abundance of materials is a huge draw but not needing to re-invent the wheel each time
• I encourage everyone to give OER materials a try and to seek out a course to help them understand what
OER is all about!
• NOTE: My 7 year old son thought this needed a pic of a white shark attacking a seal…
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-
SA-NC
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-
NC-ND