News

The eTeach Network Thuringia participates as the seventh mandated state institution in the Cooperation Network OER (KNOER).

On 23 September 2022, the Cooperation Network OER (KNOER) met to accept another state institution. The Managing Director responsible for Strategic Development, Planning & External Cooperation, Sebastian Metag, introduced the eTeach Network Thuringia to the KNOER members and representatives of the responsible ministries in a short presentation before it was unanimously decided to accept it into KNOER.

The eTeach Network sees itself as a competence network for digital higher education teaching in Thuringia and bundles all activities associated with media-supported teaching and learning in the state’s higher education sector. In addition, it promotes open exchange and the provision of experiences and results. Further information can be found at this link.

The eTeach network actively participates in KNOER with the aim of generating synergies, pooling best practice experiences and exploring cooperation with network partners from which Thuringia’s higher education institutions can benefit. KNOER is looking forward to the contributions of an institution competent in digital university teaching and to the participation of another federal state.

At the beginning of July 2022, the German Council of Science and Humanities published the comprehensive paper with recommendations on digitisation in teaching and studies. It clearly addresses the great potential of digitisation to improve the quality and flexibility of teaching. The Federal Government and the Länder are called upon to establish a cross-Länder infrastructure with a focus on open educational materials (OER). In this way, teaching and learning materials can be shared and further developed across university and state borders with legal protection. The cooperation network KN-OER, an association of seven federal states with their platforms, is addressed here:

• Baden-Württemberg: Central Repository for Open Educational Resources (ZOERR)
• Hamburg: Multimedia Kontor
• Hesse: HessenHub
• North Rhine-Westphalia: Open Resources Campus NRW (ORCA.nrw)
• Rhineland-Palatinate: Virtual Campus (VCRP)
• Saxony: Education Portal
• soon also Thuringia: eTeach Network

With OER, teaching and learning materials can be used free of charge, adapted to one’s own needs and disseminated further. Access to education is considerably simplified through OER and lifelong learning is also possible independently of formal education programmes. Free access means that materials can be effectively checked for their quality.

With a special search index for OER, those materials that best fit one’s own requirements can be identified from the abundance of available materials. The state portals are committed to ensuring that materials are not only available in the long term, but that they can also be easily updated. In this way, collections of OER materials can be built up that are particularly relevant for basic subjects.

In order to use the potential of OER more comprehensively than before, work is being done on the interoperability of the platforms. For example, in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, work is being done on the technical connection of the state portals ORCA.nrw and OPENEDU-RLP with the platforms of the universities. This enables teachers to integrate OER from the state portal into their courses in a low-threshold manner.

The development of the cross-Länder OER infrastructure requires not only human but also financial resources, which have so far been distributed very unevenly across the Länder. From the perspective of higher education teaching, a further alignment or harmonisation of conditions is a central educational policy goal. With an infrastructure fund for OER repositories and interfaces, the federal government could support in the sense of the subsidiarity principle. Following on from the BMBF-funded “OER-Info” programme, a nationwide service and information centre could coordinate and make visible the state of knowledge and development on OER in higher education.

Contact person:

PD Dr. Markus Deimann
Management

Office of the State Portal ORCA.nrw
Location: Ruhr University Bochum
O-Werk
Suttner-Nobel-Allee 4
44803 Bochum

E-mail: Markus.Deimann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Phone: + 49 (0) 234/32-26143

Dr. Konrad Faber
Management

Virtual Campus Rhineland-Palatinate
Erwin-Schrödinger-Str. Building 57
D-67663 Kaiserslautern

E-mail: faber@vcrp.de
Tel: +49 (0) 631/205-4948

“I am pleased that with the establishment of a cross-border network, an important basis for the more intensive exchange of open educational materials across national borders could be laid. The increasing digitization of university teaching, which has picked up speed again in the course of the Corona pandemic, and the free licensing of digital teaching materials makes more educational offers possible for everyone! With the establishment of a cooperation network, an important stage was reached in the efforts of the federal states and their institutions for digital teaching to better network their OER platforms in the future and to exchange innovative teaching ideas more intensively. Open educational materials are an important driver of innovation for the dissemination of new learning and teaching ideas in university teaching. The cross-state networking of the OER platforms means that the pool of available OER materials in the individual federal states can be expanded more than if the states were to go it alone, and the variety of innovative ideas also increases. I am particularly pleased that the Virtuelle Campus Rheinland-Pfalz (VCRP) has taken over the chair of the cooperation network together with ORCA.nrw. The Virtuelle Campus Rheinland-Pfalz recognized the added value of OER early on and has been involved in this area for a long time. With the support of the state, the Virtuelle Campus Rheinland-Pfalz has set up an OER platform and is constantly developing it, advises universities on the provision of OER materials and recently launched an OER program to develop digital teaching materials created during the pandemic. I wish the cooperation network every success in its work, thank the institutions involved for their commitment and hope that the network will continue to grow in the future!”

Yours, Clemens Hoch

Minister for Science and Health in Rheinland-Pfalz