How to: Building an institutional OER ecosystem

In the dynamic higher education landscape, the integration of Open Educational Resources (OER) has become a key force that drives accessibility of knowledge, innovation in teaching and collaboration between experts.
between experts. This webinar looks at the development of an institutional OER ecosystem from a university perspective and provides insights into implementation using the example of the University of Vienna.

In essence, the path to building OER support structures – which, depending on the design of the OER ecosystem, may be closely linked to RDM support – is about taking into account the diverse needs and perspectives of different stakeholders, including users, producers, infrastructure managers and decision-makers. By highlighting these different perspectives, institutions can identify sound ways to implement open education in practice.

Parallels to the institutional anchoring of open access and open data in research show that OER, as openly licensed publications from teaching, mean a transformation of the latter. To this end, it is necessary not only to promote expertise in the use and creation of OER, but also to ensure their sustainable availability for all stakeholders – all this supported by infrastructures and services of the respective OER ecosystem, often closely interlinked with research-supporting services.

Against this background, the webinar will focus on the role of transdisciplinary collaboration between the key players in the development/expansion of an institutional OER ecosystem, including e-learning centres, central IT services and libraries. Through close cooperation between these departments, universities can effectively support teachers and staff in embedding OER. In addition, results from the overall OER package for the Austrian higher education area “Open Education Austria Advanced”, which is funded by the BMBWF, will be highlighted in this context and possible further ways of implementation will be shown.