Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources are openly accessible and free educational materials that are available to teachers and learners without the payment of licence or usage fees. Any medium can be used to create OER materials: Curricula, course materials, textbooks, streaming videos, multimedia applications, podcasts - all of these resources are OER if they are published under an open licence. OER is not the same as eLearning, but open educational materials can be used for this purpose. The difference to other educational materials is that OER are provided with a licence that allows them to be reused and edited without having to obtain prior permission from the author.

Free access to educational materials is a great opportunity to promote education and knowledge for all people. The aim is to remove serious restrictions on access to education for many people worldwide. In addition, the quality of education can also benefit if open licences enable the shared reuse and further development of educational resources. Last but not least, the dissemination of OER also helps to raise the profile of the creator. 

OER are regularly published under a licence that allows the work to be edited. In these cases, a user has a great deal of freedom to adapt the materials so that they meet the needs of the individual context. However, if the licence restricts adaptation, others may not modify the resource. It must then be used as it is. However, this licence option is not often chosen for OER, as the vast majority of OER creators are happy for users to be able to edit the original resource and adapt it to their needs.

If you want to create an OER, think about this from the outset. Therefore, only use material that you have created yourself or that is available under an appropriate reusable licence. Think about which tools you need. Also determine the final format and licence under which you want to publish it. 

Open licences are a simple way of granting other people rights to access, use, edit and distribute a work without the need for a separate agreement. Authors (or rights holders) of educational material use standardised licence agreements for this purpose, such as the so-called ‘Creative Commons’ licences (CC licence for short), the terms of which can be viewed by everyone on the Internet.

Only the CC 0, CC BY and CC BY SA licences allow unrestricted modification and reuse of OER material. Material with the CC BY NC licence may not be reused in commercial contexts, but modifications are permitted. The addition ND prohibits the modification of the material and is therefore unusable for the purpose of re-use with simultaneous adaptation of the resource. When creating new OER material as described above, the newly created material must be provided with the licence of the OER material used, which entails the greatest restrictions.

There are two types of platforms on which educational materials can be searched and found: Repositories are databases on which resources are stored. In addition, there are so-called referatories, which contain metadata and links and thus refer to the materials. Finding explicit OER materials is made possible by the fact that the CC licences are machine-readable.

• Google search: Google enables targeted filtering by licence in the image search. Under Tools and Rights of Use, you can restrict the results displayed to CC-licensed materials.
• OERhörnchen: The ‘OERhörnchen’ uses the machine readability of CC licences to search specifically for OER. The tool is based on open source software and allows users to search several OER portals simultaneously. With the help of the open code, experienced programmers can also integrate other portals into the search. It is no longer maintained, but can still be a good starting point. 
• University and country collections: In an international context, it is worth taking a look at the Open Education Consortium, which makes it possible to search for courses and course materials from hundreds of universities worldwide.Examples of collections of OER in Germany include the Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU), a joint project of all universities in the state of Hamburg, the OpenRUB platform of the Ruhr University Bochum, the central OER repository of the state of Baden-Württemberg (ZOERR), orca.nrw, the online portal for digital learning and teaching in NRW, twillo, the OER portal of the state of Lower Saxony and the MOOC platform Mooin, which is operated by the company Oncampus. OERsi is a search index for open educational resources in university teaching and a joint project of the Hanover Technical Information Library (TIB) and the North Rhine-Westphalia University Library Centre (hbz).