OER and its Benefits
The OERs - Open Educational Resources is by intheacademia, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Benefits of OER
Using OER can be very beneficial for both you and your students. OER offer flexibility, money savings, and more access to educational materials, to name a few of the benefits of open resources. Below, you will find some more in-depth information about the benefits of using OER for your instructional methodology, as well as examples of successful use of OER at NYU.
Expanded Access to Learning
OERs can be accessed on the internet at any time of day, from the first day of any given course. This allows students to complete their work on their own schedules, without having to worry about their education interfering with their other obligations.
Flexibility
OER offer you the ability to modify your course materials to meet your specific needs for a course. It allows you to narrow down the topics of your materials to be directly relevant to your class, instead of a textbook which may have a lot of information that is not relevant to a specific course.
Inclusion, Diversity, Belonging, Equity, and Accessibility (IDBEA)
IDBEA is about dismantling oppression and redistributing power and utilizing OERs directly allows you to work towards both of those goals. OER can be revised and tailored easily to faculty's and student's voices and experience, and to keep up with cultural conceptions of inclusion and equity. They present an opportunity to find and build new alternatives to standard texts, many of which perpetuate racism, gender-based inequity, ageism, ableism, and other systemic inequities, rather than waiting and hoping for a traditional publisher to address those issues in a new edition.
Faster Dissemination
The traditional publishing route for textbooks can be extremely time-consuming. By publishing materials directly to the internet, then you can get new information to your students and the broader education community more quickly.
Cost Saving
Students spend hundreds of dollars on textbooks each semester. OER allows reading and other course materials to be freely available to students. By making reading freely available, students could utilize those hundreds of dollars to spend on other necessities.
Use of OER at NYU
Schools across NYU have already begun to integrate OERs into their course materials. You can find case studies of work from various schools at NYU at the [Open Educational Resources Case Studies.](https://guides.nyu.edu/oer/case_studies) These initiatives have already saved NYU students thousands of dollars while giving them access to the most relevant information for specific courses. The movement for OER within the university is growing, because of the wonderful benefits that OER can provide to both students and faculty.
The text in this section was written by Marissa Ajamian Grossman, licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0
Go to: What is an Open Educational Resource (OER)? or Finding and Evaluating OER