Connecting Resources and Users – requirements for a federated cross-sectorial infrastructure for OER Members : #OER16

Group Admins

Public Group Active 8 years, 7 months ago

Tue, Apr 19 2016, 11:30am – 1:00pm

Authors: Richard Heinen, Ingo Blees, Michael Kerres, Gianna Scharnberg, and Marc Rittberger

Room: Holyrood

Theme: Converging or diverging cultures of openness

Type: Presentation

Description

During the last year the awareness of OER in Germany was rising continuously. The first whitepaper on OER in the School sector (Muuß-Merholz & Schaumburg, 2014) was followed by whitepapers on OER in higher education (Deimann et al, 2015) and life long learning. A governmental workgroup released a working paper on OER in that they set two main issues to focus in.

1) To build or support web services that collect references to OER.

2) To discuss further issues like quality and qualification, licencing or business models.

The first point can be seen as a result from experiences in other countries. Even if a growing number of OERs is produced, the findability remains to be a problem. Even more: When the number of OER increases, it becomes more difficult to find the best suitable resource (Comas-Quinn, Borthwick, 2015, Weller, 2014). To solve this problem it seems to be helpful to raise the awareness to an open informational ecosystem for OER. There is a need to look at the whole workflow from creating and publishing a resource, the creation of describing metadata by different people and institutions to the usage in the learning process. And it has to be remembered that the usage in the learning process includes what Wiley describes as the 5R (Wiley, 2014). As long as teachers and students do not make use of the benefits described by the 5R, OER only changes the way in which materials are distributed. That may be a value in itself, but remixing, republishing and sharing materials make them strong.

To realize the workflow especially for the interactive part that involves users the question of an interoperable infrastructure becomes urgent.

The paper reports on recent investigations carried out in Germany to analyse the existing inventory of repositories and reference systems or referatories for OER and the specific needs and preconditions of different educational sectors and to assert the requirements needed to build the hitherto missing links in a model/blueprint for a federated cross-sectorial infrastructure.

Reference

Comas-Quinn, A., & Borthwick, K. (2015). Sharing: Open Educational Resources for Language Teachers. Developing Online Language Teaching: Research-Based Pedagogies and Reflective Practices, 96.

Deimann, M., Neumann, J., Muuß-Merholz, J. (2015). Whitepaper Open Educational Resources (OER) an Hochschulen in Deutschland – Bestandsaufnahme und Potenziale 2015.

Kultusministerkonferenz & Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (2015). OER: Bericht der Arbeitsgruppe aus Vertreterinnen und Vertretern der Länder und des Bundes zu Open Educational Resources.

Muuß-Merholz, J., Schaumburg, F. (2014). Open Educational Resources (OER) für Schulen in Deutschland 2014. Whitepaper zu Grundlagen, Akteuren und Entwicklungen.

Wiley, D. (2014). The Access Compromise and the 5th R. Iterating toward Openness. http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221

Weller, M. (2014). Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. http://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/books/download/11/167/battle-for-open/

Go Back