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Why use open practices?

Why use open practices?

Open educational resources are just one part of a global open education movement seeking to promote and support more equitable and sustainable education for all. A broader term, open educational practices (OEP), includes the use of OER as well as open pedagogy and open sharing of teaching practices. Openness, in all these forms, has many benefits for educators, learners, educational institutions and wider communities.

Benefits for educators:

  • Why re-invent the wheel? Reusing existing open resources frees up time that can be spent on other aspects of the teaching and learning process. Use of OER can help you to expand your range of free, up-to-date learning and teaching materials.
  • Creating OER can help to improve your teaching by exploring beyond your immediate environment, finding others interested in and teaching similar subjects, and broadening your views. Many who use, create, and share OER find that it reinvigorates their teaching.
  • Working with OER can help you to develop your digital literacies (and your students’ digital literacies), particularly around working with digital content, intellectual property, networks, and a variety of digital and participatory media.
  • Using OER and OEP can help expand your network, facilitating working across subject disciplines, institutions, and sectors, enabling you to benefit from diverse global networks and knowledge.
  • Sharing your materials can help raise your profile and allow your resources to be used, adapted, and improved by other users. Overall, you can improve your profile and impact.
  • By openly licensing the educational resources you create, you contribute to society in a unique way: sharing publicly funded resources publicly, enabling people in your local and national communities, as well as globally, to access, adapt, and gain benefit from them.

Benefits for learners:

  • Learners have freedom of access to course and course-related materials before enrolling as a student, while a student (at work/home/on placement), and after being a student.
  • Seeing/applying knowledge in wider contexts than their course/module typically allows.
  • Using learner-centred, self-directed, peer-to-peer and social/informal learning approaches.
  • Authentic or ‘real-life’ learning experiences through OER can link to employer or professional sector activities.
  • Learners can also benefit from opportunities to contribute toward OER development and/or evaluation, or by creating their own OER.

Benefits for educational institutions:

  • Increased sharing of ideas and practice within the institution, among all staff and students.
  • Wider availability of academic content and focus on the learning experience. For more information review – Widening Access to Higher Education.
  • Increased capacity to support remote students.
  • Efficiencies in content production (e.g. generic content that can be used across subject areas).
  • New relationships with students as they become collaborators in OER production and use.
  • Increasing digital competencies, including understanding of intellectual property rights.
  • New partnerships/collaboration with other institutions and organisations across other sectors.
  • Recognition and enhanced institutional reputation.

Benefits for other individuals and wider communities:

  • Access to quality peer-reviewed research and free, open, repurposable educational content.
  • New potential partnerships with content providers and other sectors.
  • Enabling collaborative approaches to teaching/learning (communities of practice).
  • Enhanced communication and collaboration within educational institutions and with peers in other institutions/organisations, other sectors, and globally.
  • Open access to legacy materials

References & Resources

Note: This content was adapted from OER/OEP resources for CELT, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Centre for Excellence in Learning & Teaching, National University of Ireland, Galway.