Open Educational Resources (OER)
Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible teaching and learning materials that can be used, adapted, and shared without legal or technical barriers. The idea is simple: knowledge created in educational contexts should be openly available, so that others can build upon it. OER can be anything from lecture slides and worksheets to textbooks, videos, or interactive learning modules. What makes them “open” is not only free access, but also the permission to revise, remix, or redistribute the materials, indicated via an open license. To ensure that it is clear how your materials may be reused, OER should always be published under such a license, ideally a Creative Commons license (such as CC BY or CC BY-SA). There even is an official UNESCO recommendation on OER!
Today’s resources provide a practical entry point into the world of OER: the website open-educational-resources.de (in German) offers extensive information and examples on OER in different areas of education, ranging from school to higher education, while this short video introduction to OER (also in German) explains the basic idea in a concise and accessible way. Together, they help you understand how OER can enrich your teaching and how you can contribute with your own materials to the growing collection of open teaching materials.