Abstract:

The Open Educational Resource (OER) expression refers to any type of material developed for educational purposes that is offered at no cost and available to be used with some degree of freedom determined by the use license that accompanies it.

Developed for educational purposes, an OER can be an image, table, video, animation, set of slides, lesson plan, schedule of activities, text, book, or educational software, i.e., any resource that can be used to support the teaching–learning process. The concept of OER refers to publicly accessible educational materials, licensed with permissions that include using the material as presented, copying all or part of its content, modifying it, adapting it to a new need, combining it with other materials to generate new material, or redistributing it by sharing it with others in its original, modified, or combined form.

OERs provide the opportunity to:
- expand free and unpaid access to knowledge because anyone has the right to access knowledge anywhere at any time;
- adapt and improve materials for different educational needs;
- improve materials continuously through the participation of different authors over time;
- increase the speed of the dissemination of knowledge since OERs are generally distributed in digital form on the internet;
- save teachers time and money by using OERs such as lesson plans, texts, slide sets, and educational software;
- achieve cost savings for students because access to knowledge is free;
- encourage knowledge generation and sharing; and
- remove barriers to knowledge, contributing to the development of more inclusive and egalitarian societies.

Despite these advantages, the use of OERs in K–12 education is still limited. Therefore, this work investigates the challenges that teachers face when using OERs at this educational level. The investigation was conducted via a literature review. This article explains the review method used, discusses the challenges, and presents the results.

The results suggest that K–12 teachers underuse OERs. Blackboard and textbooks still predominate in classrooms. Some of the challenges to the large-scale deployment of OERs are the need to:
(1) develop social awareness of the importance of OERs to promote public policies that encourage the use of these resources,
(2) invest in schools’ infrastructure, especially in computer networks connected to the internet, and
(3) value the work of K–12 teachers through the implementation of public policies that understand that the exercise of the teaching activity is more than teaching classes and encompasses the time necessary for research, reflection, learning, and preparation of new educational practices.

Keywords:

Open Educational Resource, K-12, Teachers.