Open Educational Resources in Higher Education

Abstract

Open educational resources (OER) are openly licensed educational materials that can be used in different educational settings to help make education available to all. However, proper deployment of OER still faces many barriers, including the lack of know-how among educators and helpful supporting tools. Many educators do not have the necessary knowledge to efficiently find, utilize, edit, or distribute high quality OER. Adding to this challenge is the lack of technical tools to support them when producing OER or converting their existing educational materials to OER. In this paper, the authors introduce two practical approaches applied at the Learning Technologies Research Group at RWTH Aachen University to enhance the utilization of OER in higher education. The first one addresses the qualification of educators to the concept of OER, and the second one focuses on providing technical support to educators when producing OER.