Open Educational Resources (OER) are a useful tool for both teachers and students. On this page, we provide a number of reasons for why you could engage with OER, and showcase some research into the effectiveness of OER adoption.

There are numerous reasons for engaging with Open Educational Resources (OER), ranging from value-based ones to more practical and social ones. Furthermore, depending on your position within a teaching institution, what concerns weigh most heavily may change. Below, we provide a few of these reasons, some of which may be applicable to you and your own situation. However, this is not an exhaustive list, so many more reasons exist. You can find more reasons on the webpage of the European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL).

• Using OER and sharing your own materials openly helps open up academia and science.

• There is an (inter)national movement towards using OER and OE, so by switching now you can stay on top of all the developments.

• Universities are often publicly funded institutions, so results and products from universities should be publicly accessible.

• OER are more sustainable, as they can be shared with and reused by a worldwide audience.

• OER can constantly be updated by many authors, ensuring that developments in the fields are directly incorporated in teaching materials.

• OER are scrutinized in the public eye, ensuring higher quality materials.

• OER are adaptable, so you can change them to fit your teaching and students, rather than change your teaching to fit your materials.

• OER are inclusive, so they can be adapted to address the needs of all your students, also those with disabilities.

• OER are always accessible, ensuring that students, alumni, teachers, and citizens alike can always find relevant study materials to read up on.

• OER can be used by both teachers and students, allowing for more active learning settings and greater teaching quality.

• OER give students the opportunity to become creators of educational material and gain credit outside of the specific course for their work.

• OER are free, reducing the costs for students to take courses.

• OER are free from complicated copyright structures, removing doubt about the availability of products and usage of materials

• OER can represent an alternative to research outputs, highlighting the excellence of both the teacher and the teaching institution.

For some OER, some reasons may ring more true than others. Nevertheless, we invite you to consider how adopting open educational resources in your own teaching can help you bring your own courses to a higher level, as well as how your existing materials may be beneficial to other teachers across the world.

Tracking the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and research into the subject have shown that enthusiasm for OER and open textbook adoption has a solid basis.

The most common statistic associated with OER adoption is the costs saved, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has shown that over $1 billion have been saved through the adoption of OER.

Other research has found that students perform equally well in courses using open resources as in courses using traditional ones, and students generally seem to prefer OER to more traditional resources (Hilton III, 2016; 2020; and a video by Research Shorts detailing the first paper below, all licensed under a CC-BY 4.0 international license). Moreover, other research has shown that OER adoption compared to using traditional resources can even increase student performance (Colvard, Watson, & Park, 2018; Grew & Preston Davis, 2017, both licensed under a CC-BY 4.0 international license). A recent meta-analysis further confirms these findings and highlights OER as a cos-effective and scalable intervention to increase access to higher education (Cho & Permzadian, 2024).

An important qualifier is that most research has been focused on the North American context, as the adoption of open resources has been more prevalent there than elsewhere. Nevertheless, this data is an optimistic sign for the potential of OER.
 

With the information in this guide, we hope you see why OER could be used in your teaching. If you need more support or have questions regarding why OER could be useful to you, you can reach the OER support services at: oer-library@rug.nl.

In our other guides, we outline what OER are, how copyright is related to OER, where you can find suitable OER yourself, how you can implement any found OER in your teaching, how you can create your own OER, and how you can share your own work as an OER with the world.