Ten Years Later: Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education, and Why We Should Care

Key Takeaways Open educational resources made a dramatic appearance with the 2002 debut of MIT's Open Courseware initiative. In the roughly 10 years since, OERs have not noticeably disrupted the traditional business model of higher education or affected daily teaching approaches at most institutions. Four major hurdles seem the likeliest hindrances to adoption of OERs: discoverability, quality control, bridging the last mile, and acquisition. OERs could unify and advance the essentially disconnected developments in digital textbooks and MOOCs by establishing a global enterprise learning content management system.