Open Educational Resources

Intro

Source: OERinForm (2018). Was sind OER? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpjrmx513wk&t=0s (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The key takeaways from this article are:

1

Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials that may be accessed, used, adapted, and re-distributed by everyone at no cost.

2

Advantages for research and teaching arise both in the use and the creation of OER.

3

There are many platforms on which OER can be found or made available to the public

Definition

There is no generally accepted definition of Open Educational Resources (OER). Among the many definitions, the following German Commission for UNESCO (n.d.) definition, which is derived from the Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) adopted by UNESCO's General Conference in 2019 (UNESCO, 2019), is particularly useful:

 

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials of any type and in any medium that have been released under an open licence. Such a licence permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others with no or minor restrictions. The authors themselves determine which rights of use they grant and which rights they reserve. OER may comprise individual materials or complete courses or books. Any medium may be used. Curricula, course materials, textbooks, streaming videos, multimedia applications, podcasts – all these materials are OER if they have been released under an open licence.” (Our translation from the German)
 

German Commission for UNESCO (n.d.) definition (available only in German); see also the UNESCO Recommendation on OER (UNESCO, 2019).

Why OER?

OER offer a range of advantages for research and teaching:

Advantages of using OER:

  1. Existing materials can be re-used, adapted, continuously developed, and kept up to date. The time gained can be used for one's own research.
  2. The choice of an open licence creates legal certainty and protects against copyright infringements.

Advantages of creating or updating OER:

  1. The visibility of one's own teaching and research is increased.
  2. Digitalisation and networking enable new collaborations.
  3. Update support from others contributes to the improvement of one's own materials.

Open Educational Resources

Source: Schneider, H. (2022). Facilitate your Teaching with OER. https://youtu.be/DMf-xtgGAoQ (CC BY 4.0)

Legal Certainty Through Open Licences

On the basis of copyright, open licences regulate access to and re-use, adaptation, and distribution of materials released under the respective licence. There are a variety of Creative Commons (CC) licences to choose from, each granting different rights of use. The most open CC licences are CC BY and CC BY-SA. Authors can also release their works under a CC0 licence, thereby waiving all exploitation rights.

OER offer a legally secure way of making available and sharing educational materials. Note that graphics and figures are not always covered by the same licence as the rest of the content. If this is the case, it is recommended that you include a note in the imprint of your publication to the effect that individual materials are covered by a different CC licence or are not covered by such a licence. Irrespective of the licence used, details of the image rights for each figure should be included in the figure caption or in an index of figures.

An updated legal opinion commissioned inter alia by the German Consortium for Research Data on Material and Immaterial Heritage Culture, NFDI4Culture (Klimpel & Rack, 2023), offers guidelines on how audiovisual materials may be used in research and teaching. It outlines the cases in which permission must be sought and in which use is permitted by law.

Creative-Commons-Lizenzen für Open Access

Quelle: Brinken, H., Hauss, J. & Rücknagel, J. (2021). Creative-Commons-Lizenzen für Open Access, open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.5446/53409 (CC BY 3.0 DE)

Where Can I Search for OER?

Some universities and institutions offer OER, for example in the form of online courses; others provide search engines for OER content.

General search engines
On some platforms (e.g., Google, YouTube, Soundcloud) there are filters for searching for CC-licensed materials.

Images
Platforms that offer CC-licensed graphics and photos include Wikimedia Commons and Flickr.
Further platforms are listed on the CC Search Portal.

Music
The Free Music Archive (FMA) is a platform for music released under a CC licence. Creative Commons has also created a list of further platforms of this type.

Videos
YouTube offers a search filter for CC-licensed materials. Terra X, the German public broadcaster ZDF's documentary series, makes some videos available under a CC BY or CC BY-SA licence.

In the case of every media provider mentioned on this page, please check again whether the selected materials are in fact covered by a CC licence.

The following platforms specialise in OER:

  • FOSTER: E-learning platform für open science 
  • Hamburg Open Online University: Collection of courses and learning materials
  • Mason OER Metafinder (MOM): Search engine for OER content
  • MITOPENCOURSEWARE: OER from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  • OER Commons: Public digital library of OER
  • OER-Contentbuffet: Collection of materials to raise awareness of and develop competencies in OER; the service is provided by OERinfo
  • OERSI: Open Educational Resources Search Index 
  • OpenLEarnWare: Recordings of lectures from many faculties of the Technical University of Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt)
  • ORCA.nrw: OER portal of the higher education institutions in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia
  • TIB AV-Portal: Quality-controlled science videos
  • Twillo: OER portal of the higher education institutions in the state of Lower Saxony
  • Zenodo: Universal data repository; part of the OpenAIRE project
  • ZOERR: Central OER repository of the higher education institutions in the state of Baden-Württemberg

Further Information

You can find comprehensive information about OER on the OERinfo website.

The OER Strategy of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) contributes to the promotion of OER.

OER About Open Access and Open Science

open-access.network has created a wide variety of materials about the project. They include, for example, videos, event concepts, presentations, and recommendations for further reading.

You can find a selection of external OER about open access und open science here.

References

Further Reading

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