Group Admins
Public Group
Active 10 years ago
Description
The pitch on the “Bündis freie Bildung” (BFB, Alliance for Open Education) will offer the audience an insight into the aims, work and political objectives of the major network of Open Educational Resources in Germany. The first part of the talk will sketch the vision of the BFB, to make educational materials acessible without any judicial or technical barriers. A major problem that BFB seeks to address is the lack of activities on a policy level connecting the abstract work on open education and the grassroots OER initiatives already active in Germany. To address this issue, the concrete actions taken by BFB will be portrayed. These include lobbing politicians on the federal and state level to act in favour of the more widespread use of open licenses for. Moreover, politicians are urged to support OER initiatives by incentivising the procurement of open learning materials and to integrate OER into the training of teachers. A second important field of activity of the BFB is to connect different actors working on OER in order to formulate and propagate political demands. The second part of the talk will introduce Serlo, a partner of the network. Serlo is the biggest OER initiative in Germany that creates a platform for open educational resources that aims to become the “Wikipedia of learning”. In 2014, Serlo has provided more than 6000 articles, exercises and solutions used by over 1.8m German visitors. Finally, the future challenges and the way ahead for OER in Germany and the possibilities for international cooperation will be sketched out.