Developing an Open Educational Resources (OER) Course: Benefits and Barriers

Abstract

Textbook prices have soared over the past two decades, placing a heavy financial burden on students and impacting some students academically. Legislation at both the federal and state levels has been passed in an attempt to intervene the textbook affordability crisis. Open Educational Resources (OER) is lauded as an affordable alternative to costly print textbooks, a possible solution to this crisis. This paper describes a university faculty’s experience of integrating OER materials in an online graduate reading pedagogy course and reflects on the benefits and barriers of teaching with OER. The OER project is described, the course redesign for integrating OER is detailed, the benefits and barriers of teaching with OER from a faculty’s perspective are discussed, and recommendations for future OER implementation are presented