Developing Courses and Programs Using Open Education Resources: Challenges and Opportunities

The cost of a college degree in the United States has increased over 1000% in the past 30 years (Jamrisko & Kolet, 2012), with Americans currently spending an estimated $450 billion dollars each year for post-secondary education. For many, student loans have been the only way to keep up with the increasing cost, and student loan debt is now over $1 trillion dollars (Kavoussi, 2012). Recognizing the need to decrease costs where possible, many colleges have turned to open source content since over $12 billion dollars is spent each year for textbooks. Open educational resources (OER), such as learning management systems (for example Moodle), free or inexpensive online textbooks (bookboon, Flat World Knowledge), supplemental study materials or courses (MIT Open Courseware, Coursera, Khan Academy), word processing tools such as AbiWord , as well as full productivity suites such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice (Giza, 2009), indeed help reduce out of pocket expenses. Curating these resources, however, for course and/or program development – while presenting a wonderful opportunity, is not without its challenges.

This presentation will provide a balanced discussion and interactive session around the challenges and opportunities in developing courses and programs using OER’s.

References:
Giza, B. (2009). The use of free, open-source, and web-based tools in education. In I. Gibson et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2009 (pp. 1838-1842). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
Jamrisko, M, & Kolet, I. (2012, Aug 15). Cost of college degree in U.S. oars 12 fold: Chart of the day. http://www.bloomberg.com
Kavoussi, B. (2012 Mar 22) Student loan debt hits $1 trillion, deemed ‘too big to fail’ by one Federal agency. http:/www.huffingtonpost.com