General questions about OER

OER are any type of teaching and learning material that are made available in the public domain or under an open license. Such open license allows free access, use, modification, and redistribution by others with none or minor restrictions. The authors themselves determine which rights of use they grant and which rights they reserve. OER include textbooks, curricula, course concepts, scripts, tasks, tests, projects, audio, video and animation formats.

• OER offer the opportunity to optimize teaching materials and thereby relieve the teachers.
• OER support open forms of teaching and learning that actively involve students and thus impart important skills.
• OER facilitate the adaptation of teaching to the challenges of diversity.
• OER make best practice examples visible in teaching and encourage imitation. In this way, OER can improve the quality of teaching.
• OER enable synergies and cooperation across university boundaries.
• OER can increase the reputation of university teachers.
• A nationwide OER platform makes the excellent teaching achievements at universities and colleges worldwide visible.

In their own interest alone, no author will publish material where there is a fear of accusation or embarrassment. Published teaching materials are just as much academic figureheads as other scientific publications. Moreover, errors or outdated information can be easily improved at any time. By you, too, of course.

Of course, many people initially only want to reuse material, but even a few sharers can inspire a whole culture of sharing. Wikipedia also started out small. Be an inspiration and role model for others.

In addition to the good feeling of doing something for good education for everyone, the publication of teaching material as an OER opens a wide range of opportunities for you to receive feedback and recognition. If you became a university teacher to inspire others and pass on your knowledge, with OER you have the chance to reach many more people than just those sitting in your lecture hall.

Check if a free license is right for your work.
The two test questions are: Do you want this content to be distributed as widely as possible? Are you willing to give up some control over what happens to the material?

Check that you alone are authorized to grant the license.
In order to license a work, the rights of third parties must not be violated (e.g. personal rights, trademark rights, etc.). This also means that you must be the sole author. In addition, it must be checked whether, e.g. in the case of a work that was created professionally, the rights of the employer are also affected.

Choose the license that best suits your needs.
There are different licenses to choose from (see Licensing Questions in the next section).

Indicate how the attribution should be made.
As the licensor, you can determine how the attribution should take place. This can be your name and/or a pseudonym and/or an institution. In the "Edit information" dialog, you have the option of specifying the authors in the desired order for each of your objects in the repository or of providing a free indication of the author.

Provide accompanying meta information.
Materials are often not 100% self-explanatory. It is then helpful to provide accompanying information for classification, such as keywords, to explain possible contexts for the use of the materials.

Provide files in editable formats.
OER allows the further processing of materials. However, the permission is of little use if, for example, only pdf-files are made available or the file formats can only be processed with specific, commercial software.

Enter the licensing notice correctly.
You can do this easily and conveniently for your materials in the repository, see this question about the correct license information.

As a student, you are welcome to publish OER in ZOERR. For quality assurance, we ask for a recommendation from the lecturer regarding the OER, which you simply send to us by e-mail.