As administrators sought to reach more students without spatial and temporal barriers experienced with traditional face-to-face education, the need for materials that could be offered digitally, at low cost, easily accessed, and accessible to those with disabilities rose. In the late 1990s, the sharing of open source and open coding projects in the tech industry inspired both the need for educational materials about the specific subject and the idea of open educational materials across academia. According to Wikipedia, the connection among these ideas was first made in 1998 by David Wiley of Lumen learning but was shortly thereafter also made independently by Richard Baraniuk, the founder and director of OpenStax.

One of the longest-running and highest-profile OER initiatives is the OpenCourseWare project from MIT, which began in 2002 and today features all of the course materials from roughly 2,400 MIT courses. The OpenCourseWare model has been replicated by dozens of colleges and universities around the world, which are putting full course materials online for anyone to use. Having access to an institution’s course resources is not intended to be equivalent to taking a course at that institution, but users can take advantage of that access to supplement or direct their own learning. Additionally, instructors at institutions worldwide can utilize those resources to supplement their own course materials or adapt them for use in their course.

Other long-standing OER efforts include OpenStax by Rice University which began as Connexions in 1999 and has since developed into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity, and the Open Learning Initiative from Carnegie Mellon, as well as the University of the People, and even iTunes U. Although OER projects use different models for how they function, all endorse the notion that teaching, learning, and research are improved when educational resources are more open and more accessible (Green, Illowsky, Wiley, Ernest, Young, & Coolidge, 2018).

While OER has roots with Open Courseware, it looks much different today. When academics today think of OER, what comes to mind is usually course materials, specifically reading materials offered to students in courses. While the number of MOOCs and the materials associated with them has skyrocketed (as has their use) over the past 10 years, the number of open texts and websites dedicated to OER has exceeded the popularity of MOOCs.

Though Open Courseware is part of OER, OER has become much deeper than just courseware. OER is used at all levels of education throughout the world, including professional training, P-12 education, self-directed learning, and higher education. The OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education. Its purpose does include cost savings, but it is also about more than that: it is about participation, activism, and inspiring educators to get involved in the participatory processes that create teaching and learning content, as well as innovative educational technologies (ISKME, 2018).

The Downside: Like all educational resources, the quality of OER can be uneven and depends largely on their sources. Some OER are simply ineffective at presenting content in a valuable manner, and not all OER collections have a feedback mechanism whereby users can share their evaluations about the quality of a resource.

The value of educational resources tends to decrease without periodic updating, and some open resources are not kept current. Even within an OER repository that is operated and sanctioned by a respected institution, individual resources might not be held to the same standard of quality as the institution’s other offerings. Many OER need to be adapted for use in a departmental or institutional context to meet local requirements or needs.

OER also have the potential to expose students and instructors to a long tail of content, most of which never finds its way into widespread educational use. Also, some open resources do not comply with the accessibility requirements for users with disabilities. Additionally, whenever the content is shared, and especially when it can be modified, questions arise over intellectual property and copyright concerns. In some cases, faculty resistance to opening their resources can be an obstacle.

The Upside: Educational resources developed in or shared into an open environment can be vetted, peer-reviewed, and then improved by a broad community of educators, resulting in materials that represent what the educational community sees as most valuable. By providing educators with new access to educational materials, open resources have the potential to spur pedagogical innovation, introducing new alternatives for effective teaching. Moreover, learning resources that can be modified and reused promote collaboration and participation—two key elements of a Web 2.0 approach to teaching and learning.

The resources required to develop high-quality learning materials and activities for a full complement of courses can be prohibitive for many institutions and instructors. However, by distributing the costs over a larger number of users, OER brings a greater range of tools within reach of more users. OER can also lower the costs for students to obtain educational content. OER and online or hybrid learning are natural partners in efforts that take advantage of— and prompt—developments in educational technology that facilitate new media, new formats, and new means of distribution (Green, Illowsky, Wiley, Ernest, Young, & Coolidge, 2018).

Whenever OERs are discussed in a room full of academics, there are sometimes contentious discussions against them, their use, dissemination, and their creation. The primary underlying feature of arguments against OER by academics is distrust:

• distrust for the quality of the content

• distrust of the creators of the content

• distrust of the entities funding the creation of content (if any)

• distrust of sharing methods

In line with this distrust is that many academics have been socialized by a multi-billion-dollar textbook industry to trust the for-profit educational materials produced by them. Publishers in the traditional textbook industry have refined their business model to produce homework platforms, course packs, and ancillary materials to support online learning, which make it easy for instructors to adopt the materials without having to produce classroom content entirely themselves (or at all). Because academics are already socialized to trust textbooks, textbook publishing companies do not need to have a focus on quality and content in order to sell.

Some distrust of OERs stem from errors found in the texts—errors that become more apparent when not hidden in graphic design details and interactive content. Promotors of OERs suggest that when OERs are examined alongside traditional texts, there is no difference in the number of errors in OER compared to traditional texts (Baraniuk and Burrus, 2008). So, what, then, is the motivation for opposing OERs, if not quality?

Publishers/creators of open textbooks and OERs do not enjoy the same funding level and access to advertising that traditional textbook publishers have. OER are nearly always created by individual faculty, and if funded, they are funded by grants from educational foundations, philanthropic organizations, and 501(c)(3) charities. OERs are not created for profit. OER publishers seek to help re-establish competition in the textbook market by competing against the for-profit textbook industry (in order to drive down prices).

By their very purpose and definition, OERs are created to make education accessible to as many people as possible without financial or spatial barriers. Any academic or company can produce their own OER content and training materials, and then share it with others in the learning community. The motivation for independent educators who create OERs is to provide equity in education, and eliminate the cost barriers to educational materials. OERs, then, are a type of grassroots global justice movement.

Traditional textbook publishers, who have enjoyed a monopoly on knowledge and authorship for decades, have an economic interest in not only promoting their own products but also in attempting to discredit OERs. With a highly trained salesforce armed with adoption statistics, it is easy to discredit a non-profit industry which lacks a salesforce, and who view adoption metrics as oppressive in much the same way that access to capital oppresses those without it from participating in the institution of education.

To be clear, because anyone can adopt or modify OERs, it is the responsibility of the teaching community to update, maintain, add to, recreate, and re-distribute OER learning materials. This means that anyone who finds an error in an OER they have adopted has the opportunity to get involved in OERs by correcting the error and sharing the material back to the learning community. With traditional textbook publishing, errors can only be rectified in new editions, and this may happen years—even decades—after the original publication dates. For most OERs, errors can be eliminated almost immediately with many materials, and with other materials (such as open texts), errors can be corrected about every six months to a year.

The primary objections to and distrust of OERs can be addressed simply through acknowledgment of the for-profit academic textbook publishers’ economic interests as powerful stakeholders in the textbook industry, involvement in the process of OER creation, and activism for the promotion and use of OERs.

his section applies primarily to Open Textbooks and Open Access materials.

The double-blind peer review process is the golden standard for review of all academic materials: both author and reviewers’ identities are concealed from one another while the reviewers, who are also subject matter experts, review the text to ensure the content is sound. Throughout the review process, modifications are made to the text to vet the material and ensure it is academically sound. While this may not completely eliminate minor errors and typos, it does ensure that conceptually, the material reflects academic thought on the topic.

Some OERs, which are published by individuals for use at their institutions, may not be peer-reviewed, even if it is a lengthy textbook. As subject matter experts in your own area, you can review these texts for appropriateness to the topic, and to see if it matches your teaching philosophy and the perspective from which you wish to teach.

Importantly, you can adopt OERs in whole or in part. That is the beauty of OERs: you can mix and match pieces from multiple OERs and sources to create the curriculum you are teaching.

Most OER textbook publishers, such as OpenStax from Rice University and the University Press of North Georgia, produce open, double-blind peer-reviewed textbooks that are offered free of charge in digital format. Students and faculty alike can request printed copies at cost of production, meaning, it will cost $30 to $60 per book. This is the cost of the materials and printing only. As previously reiterated, these are not for profit.

As new textbooks are produced on the same topic, or versions go out of date, they are typically archived on internet sites that allow users to post reviews, notes, and other materials. Many faculty find all of these helpful when considering adoption of texts.

Even textbooks that are not produced by OER publishing companies can be reviewed by subject matter experts on some OER repositories. An example of an OER repository that allows SME reviews is http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/.

The best way to ensure the quality of OERs is for faculty across the world to get involved in the OER creation and review process.

Allen, N. (2010). A Cover to Cover Solution: How Open Textbooks Are The Path To Textbook Affordability. The Student PIRGs. Available from https://studentpirgs.org/campaigns/sp/make-textbooks-affordable.

Baraniuk, R. G., & Burrus, C. S. (2008). Global Warming Toward Open Educational Resources. Communications of the ACM, 51(9), 30–32. Retrieved from http://proxygsu-ecor.galileo.usg.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=34141223&site=eds-live&scope=site

Butcher, N. (2015). A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources. Vancouver: Commonwealth of Learning. Retrieved from http://oasis.col.org/handle/11599/36.

Creative Commons (2016). Creative Commons: Remix. Available from https://vimeo.com/151666798. Last accessed September 26, 2018.

Green, C., Illowsky, B., Wiley, D., Ernest, D., Young, L., and Coolidge, A. (2018). 7 Things You Should Know About Open Education: Content. Educause Learning Initiative. Retrieved From https://library.educause.edu/resources/2018/6/7-things-you-should-know-about-open-education-content.

Hewlett Foundation, William and Flora. (2018). Open Education Resources. Available from https://hewlett.org/strategy/open-educational-resources/

Hilton, J. (2016). Open educational resources and college textbook choices: a review of research on efficacy and perceptions. Educational Technology Research & Development, 64(4), 573–590. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-016-9434-9

ISKME. (2018). OER Commons & Open Education: The Future of Education, Co-Created With You. Retrieved from https://www.oercommons.org/about.