Open educational resources, or OER, are teaching materials that reside in the public domain and are available under an open license. While the creation of high-quality materials and cyberinfrastructure to share these resources is important, OER are much more than static resource repositories. Vibrant OER communities function as collaboration hubs and often include librarians, instructional technologists, instructors, education researchers, funders, open-source software developers, and college administrators. Together, these individuals work as a community to respond to changes in the education landscape, support student learning impacts both in terms of cost savings and student retention, and solve issues related to broadly sharing open resources on the web. This essay provides general information about OER, describes communities developing OER for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education, and presents insights about sustainability challenges. The sustainability challenges are organized according to multiple dimensions: cultural and social, economic and financial, and technological and environmental. In addition, OER provide important opportunities to address and promote social justice and open and accessible education philosophies. Knowing more about the OER landscape, sustainability challenges, and educational justice opportunities can help instructors use and contribute to this growing movement to reshape the landscape of undergraduate education.

Vol. 21, No. 3

September 01, 2022

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History

Submitted: 11 August 2020

Revised: 14 April 2022

Accepted: 20 May 2022

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© 2022 C. Diaz Eaton et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2022 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 4.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0).

This material is based upon work supported by the NSF under grant no. 1919879 (C.D.E.). Grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (no. 2020-1363 and no. 2021-2923, to C.D.E.) support S-JEDI learning communities and mini-grants programs that advance and continue the work of Sustainability Challenges for Open Resources. Additionally, this work was supported by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Hatch Formula project no. 1011285 (B.D.) and NSF DUE grant nos. 1446269 (J.W.), 1725130 (M.S.), 1917387 (M.S.), and 2044189 (M.S.). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF, the Hewlett Foundation, or the USDA.

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