Abstract
Given the escalating costs of higher education, open educational resources (OER) have emerged as a means to reduce the financial burden on students and promote high-quality, accessible education to all. As a result, the last decade has witnessed increasing financing of OER initiatives by private donors, governments, and institutions. Despite students’ and faculty members’ positive perceptions of OER and evidence that students using OER perform equally well or even better than those using traditional textbooks, OER projects have not always been sustainable and those resources are still most prevalent in North America. Through a discussion of the current state of OER as well as the affordances, limitations, and barriers to their adoption, this chapter aims to examine what the future may hold for learners, educators, researchers, and publishers.
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Kotsiou, A., Shores, T. (2021). OER and the Future of Digital Textbooks. In: Marcus-Quinn, A., Hourigan, T. (eds) Handbook for Online Learning Contexts: Digital, Mobile and Open. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67349-9_2
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