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Creating diversity and making it accessible: The Network Infrastructure as Part of the Federal Government's OER Strategy
OER stands for Open Educational Resources and has the potential to increase access to education and promote the diversity of educational content.
“Mein Bildungsraum” is a key building block in the creation of a diverse digital ecosystem, as its infrastructure components enable low-threshold access to educational programmes.
How “open”" is the network infrastructure?
The network infrastructure connects existing platforms, learning management systems and digital education programmes. This network creates a digital learning space that lowers the barriers of access to the individual learning journey. The accompanying funding line will support various teaching and learning projects that will be available as OER in the long term, and thus be used by society at large. The aim of the network infrastructure is to make it easier for users to find suitable educational content and to provide broad access to public and commercial educational programmes in digital form.
All technical developments in the network infrastructure are based on open standards or standards to be developed openly. They are published as open source with appropriate licensing and documented in publicly accessible repositories so that they can be viewed, adapted and widely used by the community. The development of individual technical components is based on preliminary work by open source projects. These will be extended in a practical and application-oriented way for the overall architecture of the network infrastructure. Both open source software and OER enable users to learn from the contributions of others, to develop them further and to share their own knowledge.
What is the level of networking with OER initiatives?
As part of a “learning” OER strategy, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is in dialogue with numerous OER initiatives. The establishment of a digital network infrastructure to connect OER platforms is a key component of the planned digital ecosystem for interoperable teaching and learning infrastructures. The establishment of an OER workspace is also planned in order to support measures for dovetailing OER in conjunction with the network infrastructure.
At the so-called OERCamp2022, the “Mein Bildungsraum” project team discussed the potential and risks of such a network infrastructure with the specialist community. It was emphasised that the collaboration of the Federal Government's education projects is perceived as an opportunity for more innovation in the education landscape.
Around 500 representatives of BMBF-funded projects from the “Digital Media in Vocational Education and Training” funding programme met at the “eQualification - Lernen und Beruf digital verbinden” (in english “eQualification - Connecting Learning and Work Digitally”) conference in May 2023 to discuss the extensive transfer of project results. This also involved the networking of educational programmes and their platforms using the digital network infrastructure.
With the further development of the OERinfo centre, based at the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education (DIPF) in Frankfurt, networking and transfer in science and practice have also been funded since March 2023. The next funding measures will focus on dialogue, including with the network infrastructure project team and their funded projects.
The results of these and other discussions will be incorporated into the development of the network infrastructure in order to further promote free access to education and support innovative teaching and learning practices.
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Definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Source:
Open educational resources (OER) are educational content such as textbooks, course materials, videos, podcasts or presentations that are freely available and published digitally via open licences. Such a licence allows free access, use, adaptation and redistribution by third parties, leading to a collaborative and participatory educational culture.
The term open source comes from the software sector and refers to programmes whose source code is “open”. The programmes developed can therefore be viewed in a readable form, copied, distributed, modified and (usually) used free of charge.
Open source software can be used as a basis for the development of OER and is often used to create OER platforms or other tools. This allows educational materials to be efficiently developed, shared and improved.
