Open Educational Resources (OERs)

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational material that is shared openly so that anyone can legally and freely reuse them for example within their own teaching. OERs can be syllabi, presentation slides, lecture notes, assignments, tests, textbooks and may come in any format and medium. The reuse of the material is enabled via open licenses such as the Creative Commons licenses.

Reusing OER is in general allowed for anyone without individually seeking for permission. But with the exception of public domain / CC0 material, the source always needs to be mentioned and other restrictions might be enforced by the license.

Different types of open educational resources can be found in different repositories and specialized search engines. Good starting points are listed in the following documents/websites:

• Linkliste rund um Open Educational Resources (ZOERR)
• OER-Verzeichnisse und -Services (OERinfo)

They also contain good places to search for free images, icons, music, videos to reuse in your teaching material.

It is crucial to respect the copyright and indicate correctly any material from someone else. More information on this subject:

• „Urheberrecht“ site by the University Library
• a simple rule (TULLU) to remember the most important parts
• in-depth article „Kombinieren, Bearbeiten, Remixen: OER richtig verwenden“ (in German)

Your own educational material can be shared as Open Educational Resources. It is important thereby that you are allowed to share also any containing parts from others e.g. you are using OER yourself to create your own material.

For publishing your Open Educational Resources, we recommend you to use ZOERR, the Central Open Educational Resources Repository for all universities in the state of Baden-Württemberg and their partners. However, there are also alternative platforms or publishing options depending on the type of media.

We recommend you use the Creative Commons License CC-BY or CC-BY-SA for your Open Educational Resources.

Some examples from the University of Mannheim:

• “Academic Practice Nuggets” [13 videos] created by Sandra Morgenstern under thelicense CC-BY-SA on ZOER (collection)
• “Wissenschaft­liche Recherche” [11 videos] created by the Mannheim University Library under the license CC-BY on YouTube (Playlist)
• „Wie man lernt, den Schwarzen Tod zu unter­richten: Vorschläge für Seminarsequenzen zur mittelalterlichen Pest“ [text] by Monica H. Green published in Zeitarbeit: Aus- Und Weiterbildungs­zeitschrift für Die Geschichts­wissenschaften (DOI)
• „Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus in der deutschen Wikipedia“ [Tandem-Hauptseminar] by Maja Linthe and Angela Borgstedt under the license CC-BY-SA documented in Wikipedia: Hochschul­programm/Mannheim.