Why OER?
Teaching Benefits
Using OER in the classroom presents a unique opportunity to customize your courses and get your students more involved in their own learning.
- Since OER can be remixed and revised, it's possible to create customized resources that fit your specific course.
- Students who have their course materials from day one won't have a delay in learning or need to play catch up later.
- Students can review and revise existing resources to improve them and to help them master a subject.
- Students could create resources to add to their portfolios.
- Resources that students create could be licensed for reuse in order to benefit others.
Student Affordability
Required materials, like textbooks, can represent a significant cost to students. Textbook prices have increased over 1,000% since 1977, or more than 3 times the rate of inflation (Bureau of Labor Statistics data, 2015).
According to research on open textbook pilots conducted by Student PIRGs (Open Textbooks: the Billion Dollar Solution, 2015):
- 65% of students have declined to obtain a required textbook because they were too expensive
- Students save an average of $128 per course when traditional textbooks are replaced with open textbooks
Instructors can directly influence the cost of education for their students by adopting low- or no-cost course materials.
