Open educational resources: Vision and advantages
Open educational resources (OER) offer lecturers and education support officers several options, such as presenting themselves as education experts or improving the quality of the educational resources.
Vision and developments
In its Strategic Plan 2025, Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ aims at developing storing and making available reusable digital educational sources. Also the Plan of Action of the Open Science Programme and the Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ Library Policy Plan aim at promoting open educational resources.
In addition the Universities of the Netherlands signed the in 2022, in which is agreed to work together on creating, reusing and sharing (open) educational resources. In 2023 was started, a programme to promote digitisation in education which is joined by all public vocational and higher education institutions. One of the core themes of the programme is supporting lecturers in developing, sharing and using open educational resources.
Within the Dutch context open educational resources can be shared and found via for instance, a SURF platform mainly focused on educational resources for higher education institutions. The (in Dutch only) focuses on secondary schools and vocational education. There are international platforms such as , , and for finding and sharing open educational resources.
Advantages
Developing and using open educational resources has several advantages:
- Quality improvement, because lecturers learn from and get inspired by each other’s work, and so increase their expertise
- Recognition as education expert: lecturers and support officers can show their expertise by means of their open resources
- Saving time: existing educational resources can easily be used in their own teaching activities and so ease the workload of lecturers
- Saving money: reuse of open educational resources is free of charge and forms an alternative for resources that have to be paid for
- Students, or other interested parties, can consult educational resources on their own to further develop their (teaching) skills.
Examples of open educational resources
COSiE – Community for Open Science in Education
Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ is developing education based on the principles of Open Science. In the COSiE community, lecturers from all UU faculties work together to design teaching materials for teaching an Open Science mindset and skills. COSiE teaching materials are developed to be suitable for (re)use in different disciplines and at different academic levels. Lecturers can find the collection of open learning materials on . The COSiE community is part of .
Veterinary Online Collection
The contains semi open (for those requesting access) educational resources, published on edusources. The collection consists of videos, assignments, pictures and modules. The collection is compiled by a course community of UU lecturers and education support officers of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, in collaboration with the ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of Copenhagen and the ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of Helsinki.
Infovaders
The ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ Library's also published educational resources openly, such as the information literacy game Infovaders. Here, students learn to solve dilemmas and build their own information landscape. Game materials are published with an open license, allowing reusers to create their own version of the game with their own dilemmas. .
ShareStats
is a national database with thousands of statistics questions from previous exams and assignments. There is a lecturer version to draw up exercises and tests, and a student version for practicing purposes. The database was created through a cooperation of lecturers and education support officers of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, the ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of Amsterdam, the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, the Rotterdam Erasmus ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ and SURF.