Last week, Dr Jens Brandenburg, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), presented the nationwide “OER-Strategie – Freie Bildungsmaterialien für die Entwicklung digitaler Bildung” (in English “OER Strategy - Free Educational Materials for the Development of Digital Education”. With this strategy, the BMBF aims to promote the modernisation of the German education landscape and strengthen digital skills for all.

According to the BMBF, open, free educational materials offer particular potential for collaboration and co-operation, skills development and the development of a new pedagogical practice. In order to improve equal opportunities and permeability in the education system through digital education, OER and open educational processes are to have an impact in six fields of action:

1. embedding and building of OER expertise among education professionals 
2. development of new collaborations: from OER to Open Educational Practices (OEP) 
3. building technical foundations and structures for OER and OEP 
4. supporting innovation and cross-location education with OER 
5. accompanying OER with user-centred, application-oriented and networked research 
6. implementation: bringing together initiatives and stakeholders in digitally supported OER practice

“Mein Bildungsraum” is named as a key component of a digital ecosystem for interoperable teaching and learning infrastructures. The guiding concept of the OER strategy is a digital OER workspace that provides central OER functions and services in every educational situation bundled in the digital cockpit of learners and teachers. This includes searching, finding, collecting and finalising jointly created materials. “Mein Bildungsraum” can and should play an important role in interlinking and intelligently networking the offerings of various educational stakeholders in the field of open education.

The further development of metadata standards is seen by the BMBF as a prerequisite for a functional interface architecture between existing and new OER offerings. As a network infrastructure, “Mein Bildungsraum” also draws on data from educational programmes and includes a metadata repository as a component for securing non-personal and non-transaction-specific data. The project office will also contribute to the discourse on educational practice, bibliography and information science. 

Overall, the BMBF aims for OER infrastructures that are open and adaptable to future innovations, uses and application scenarios. Open source software makes it possible to provide such open infrastructures while at the same time meeting high security and usability requirements. As part of the development of “Mein Bildungsraum”, the source code, interfaces and documentation will be made available under open licences. In developing the infrastructure, the majority of marketable open source solutions and open source-licensed new developments will also be used. 

The interplay between the OER strategy and the development of the network infrastructure thus offers potential for strengthening a culture of openness, cooperation and sharing.

Further information

• Read more about the OER strategy (in German only)