The benefits of OER

Unlike many paid-for resources, Open Educational Resources have the potential to be used in innovative ways, and can be customised and contextualised to suit the curriculum and your students. In particular OER have the following benefits:

• OER can contribute to a quality digital learning environment that reflects our student community in that they can be customised, contextualised, made inclusive, diverse and innovative 
• OER provide unrestricted access for students before, during and after University, and for the wider community regardless of their location. Paid-for resources are only available to students for the duration of their programme of study
• OER can help to counter cost-of-living price increases for students attending university (see the report from the Sutton Trust, 2023)
• OER can complement paid-for resources, and counteract rising textbook costs and expensive and unsustainable commercial business models (see Challenges in Scholarly Publishing)
• Adapting existing OER or creating new OER is an opportunity for teaching staff to showcase their work
• By making your resource openly accessible, you provide other educators with a resource that can be readily adapted to their educational or language needs, further enhancing your impact
• OER lend themselves particularly well to regular updates and the publication of revised editions

Are they any good and is there an impact on learning?

Unlike many other forms of publication, OER are often reviewed informally and tested with students before sharing more widely. It is very common for authors and creators to invite post-publication reviews and to encourage users downstream to report errors or adapt the material to suit their own needs. Read the review for this Sheffield example:

Best, A. (2023). Introducing mathematical biology. University of Sheffield. Introducing Mathematical Biology

Using Pressbooks (see Supporting you to adapt or create OER) it is easy to share your own content with students before sharing it beyond Sheffield.

The use of OER in the UK is limited, but growing rapidly, and research into their impact is therefore also limited. The Open University conducted this research project:

Farrow, R., Pitt, R., de los Arcos, B., Perryman, L.‐A., Weller, M., & McAndrew, P. (2015). Impact of OER use on teaching and learning: Data from OER Research Hub (2013–2014). British Journal of Educational Technology, 46(5), 972–976. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12310

There is more evidence from the US to support the use of OER, such as:

Colvard, N., Watson, C. and Park, H. (2018) ‘The impact of Open Educational Resources on various student success metrics’, 30(2), pp. 262-277. Available here.