Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources

The term "Open Educational Resources" (OER) refers to free teaching and learning materials published under an open license. Teachers can freely access OERs, adapt them for their own teaching and thereby achieve an increase in quality.

(Source: Eckhoff, David (o.D.) OER in der Hochschulbildung. Universität Duisburg Essen für OERinfo – Informationsstelle OER. URL: https://open-educational-resources.de/dossierseite/?praxis=allgemein&bereich=hochschule (Accessed: 09.25.2019 : translated by Lehre 4.0 team))

Any medium, if published under an open license, is an Open Educational Resource.

CC-BY 3.0, Jonathas Mello

Advantages of OER

• OER is available to anyone with access to the Internet worldwide.

• Educational materials can be created, edited, updated and optimized in cooperation.

• University lecturers can freely access OERs and adapt them for their own teaching in order to achieve an increase in quality.

Copyright for teachers | § 60a UrhG

On 1 March 2018, the new "Act on the harmonisation of copyright law to the current requirements of the knowledge society" (UrhWissG) came into force. Paragraph § 60a UrhG permits the reproduction, distribution or public access to copyright-protected works or parts of such works for non-commercial purposes for illustration in teaching for specific recipients (e.g. participants in the respective event), i.e. only these recipients may be provided with the copyright-protected works.

How do I create and share OER?

Creating your own OER materials is not particularly complicated. Nevertheless, a few things have to be considered:

1. It must be ensured that the self-produced OER does not contain any third party, copyrighted content. Unintentional and unwitting copyright infringements can have legal consequences. OER or materials with copyrights in your own possession, may be used without hesitation.
2. If several teachers have contributed to an OER, the desired attributions must be clarified.
3.  Proper licensing must be ensured. Only with the correct license does the material become a valid OER (see also: Open licenses.
4. Before publication, the material must be provided with a corresponding license notice. The TALLP rule helps to think of all the essential components of a license notice:

• T – itel: How is the material named?
• A – thor: Who created the material
• L – icense: Under which CC license has it been published?
• L – ink to the License: Where can the license text be found?
• P – lace of origin: Where can the material be found?

(cf.: https://www.openeducation.at/fileadmin/user_upload/p_oea/OEA-Leitfaden_online_Aufl2.pdf (Accessed: 10.09.2019 : translated by Lehre 4.0 team))

The video of the FWU Media Institute of the Federal States provides a compact overview on the topic of licensing information.

Source: Infografik „Welches ist die richtige CC-Lizenz für mich?“ (Grafik von Barbara Klute und Jöran Muuß-Merholz für wb-web unter CC BY SA 3.0; http://open-educational-resources.de/wp-content/uploads/infografik_auswahl_cc_lizenz-1.jpg (Accessed: 11.19.2019))

Open Licenses | Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC)  is a non-profit organization that has developed standardized licensing agreements. With its help, authors can release their works for use by all interested parties in a targeted manner and under different license variants. The licenses can be applied to all types of works that fall under copyright law, such as texts, music, videos, images, etc.

The different CC licenses vary considerably. For example, some licenses severely restrict use, while other licenses ensure that copyright is largely renounced.

Basically four types of licenses can be distinguished:

by: The name of the author must be mentioned.

nc: The work may not be used for commercial purposes.

nd: The work may not be altered.

sa: The work must be distributed under the same license after modifications.

The graphic illustrates the different possible uses of the license construction kit.

How to find OER on the Internet?

OER can be found directly via the search function of various repositories, special search engines for free educational materials, social bookmarking systems or classic search engines with the desired license as filter criterion. For example, the tools OERHörnchen or CC Search can be used for searching.

(Source: https://www.e-teaching.org/didaktik/recherche/oer (Accessed: 10.09.2019 : translated by Lehre 4.0 team))