Attractive solutions for OER in the Austrian higher education sector

Open Education Austria Advanced, a consortium project involving several Austrian universities, promoted open access to educational resources for teaching purposes and the establishment of open practices that are similar to those used in research (Open Access, Open Data) by jointly developing a national infrastructure for OER.
 

Specific project aims were:

• To promote OERhub as a central meta-search engine for OER from higher education
• To establish local infrastructure at the partner universities
• To provide freely accessible training offers for OER
• To develop an OER certification programme for higher education institutions & teachers
• To support knowledge transfer between participating and interested higher education institutions & dissemination of the project results
   

Looking back

Open Education Austria Advanced, a project of Austrian universities for the digital transformation of higher education, paved the way for a national infrastructure for Open Educational Resources (OER) during the project period from 1 March 2020 to 28 February 2024. This pioneering project laid the foundation for high-quality OER that are accessible to teachers, students and all other interested parties without restriction.
The participating universities have jointly developed an overall package that ensures the sustainable integration of OER and Open Educational Practices at Austrian universities. The project offers a customised package for teachers, including services for the development of OER and an innovative continuing education programme. A national OER certification centre, operated by the Forum Neue Medien in der Lehre Austria (fnma), offers the opportunity to certify the OER activities of universities and the OER skills of teaching staff.
OERhub.at, a comprehensive search engine that enables easy navigation through the decentralised, institutional OER repositories, is available as a technical infrastructure. These repositories are provided by the participating universities, serve to archive and make OER available and are connected to the OERhub via an open, standardised interface. Modular system architectures and the use of open source software promote the (technical) participation of universities beyond the duration of the project.
Open Education Austria Advanced is the result of funding as part of the ‘Digital and social transformation in higher education’ call for proposals of the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research.
 

Additional Links

• OERhub: www.oerhub.at
• OER certifications: www.oer-zertifikat.at
• OEAA project website www.openeducation.at (Last updated on 31.12.2024)

The Open Education Austria Advanced project team is developing comprehensive solutions for OER technical infrastructure. The Austria-wide meta-search engine for OER from the eastern higher education area is being continuously developed, as are OER repositories that have been integrated at the individual locations. Another new feature is the plug-in that serves as the interface between the "Moodle" learning management system and a repository, making it easier to provide OER.

OERhub

Creates possibilities:

• Offers advanced OER search options to be used to search local archival systems at higher education institutions
• Enables subject-relevant material to be found

The OERhub makes it easier for you as a teacher to search for subject-relevant OER. In addition, you can find information about how to use subject-relevant OER here on our website.

By making high-quality teaching materials in your institutional archive freely accessible via the OERhub and thus available for use, you can acquire a name in the community for your respective subject area and demonstrate your teaching skill outside of your own university.

Visit the OERhub at: www.oerhub.at

OER Repositories

Strategic decisions need to be made well ahead of time to be able to make realistic and solid plans related to technical OER infrastructures. These not only concern technical aspects, such as the choice of repository software or metadata standard, but also organisational and legal aspects.

The following software products are used in the project:

• Phaidra (UW)
• Invenio (TUG)
• edu-sharing (UG, UIBK)

Information about how these products are implemented, as well as the software solutions and best practice examples developed in the project, can be found in the project's technical Knowledgebase. This mainly technical piece of documentation reflects the current state of knowledge and experiences made in the project; thus, it is being continuously updated and supplemented.

Find more info (in German) here (https://www.openeducation.at/bereitstellen/)

OER plugin for Moodle 

The Open Educational Resources (OER) plugin provides a graphical user interface (GUI) that enables OER from defined Moodle courses to be shared. In this process, the instructor (the creator) chooses which data from the Moodle course will be shared.

In addition to sharing the data, the user interface also allows the user to edit the automatically created metadata. In turn, this allows the user to alter the descriptions, which are very general and apply to the whole course, so that they more clearly describe the individual datapoints, making them more unique.

The plugin is being continuously developed by Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) and is made available to the open source community through a Git repository [1], which can be found on Github. The currently supported theme is the Moodle Boost theme.

The architecture of the plugin provides subplugins for institution-specific metadata aggregation that can be added to the plugin. As an example, a TU Graz-specific, automated metadata import feature can be found in a subplugin [2]. Another example is the explicit push export feature, which is implemented in another subplugin

The "snapshot" feature was implemented as a basic export. This creates a snapshot of the released data at a previously defined timepoint. This timepoint is freely configurable. The metadata and the data themselves can then be fetched from an OER repository (e.g. repository.tugraz.at) at the public interface.

Needed Technology for Missing Links (Ladurner et al., 2021). Image has been translated and updated. 

The plugin was created as part of a larger project (see Figure 1). Briefly, OERs generated in a Moodle instance should be sent to a central discovery tool via an OER repository (data archive, DOI registration). The OER repository takes over the archiving function for TU Graz and offers harvesters (e.g. the OERhub.at) the metadata for import at the OAI-PMH interface.

A TU Graz-specific description of the plugin for TU Graz teaching staff is found at https://telucation.tugraz.at/oer-tc/.

Links:

[1] https://github.com/llttugraz/moodle-local_oer

[2] https://github.com/llttugraz/moodle-oercourseinfo_tugraz

[3] https://github.com/llttugraz/moodle-oeruploader_tugraz

General Information:

License: GNU GPLv3

Moodle Versions: Moodle 3.9+

Additional links and information:

• https://telucation.tugraz.at/oer-tc/
• https://www.openeducation.at/
• https://www.digitaluniversityhub.eu/initiativen/in-service-verwaltung/open-education-austria/

Even more specific training measures will be developed during the project. Core elements include a completely revised OER-MOOC, a supervised OER continuing education based on this, and a training programme for becoming an OER trainer.

Based on online offers previously available in Austria, a new concept for the OER-MOOC was developed and a uniform design was produced. The MOOC has been freely available on the iMooX platform since March 3, 2022, and these self-study courses can be taken and completed anytime and anyplace. Graduates receive a certificate of participation.

Until 2024, teachers and staff at all Austrian higher education institutions have several opportunities to complete a supervised OER continuing education course free of charge. In a training programme that includes the OER-MOOCs, participants receive a comprehensive overview of OER theory and practice and invest 25 hours. After completing the programme, graduates can be certified as "OER practitioners".

As part of Open Education Austria, a train-the-trainer concept will be developed and practically tested in 2023. Participants will acquire the skills to create, apply, and evaluate an OER teaching concept. After completing the training programme, graduates can hold their own supervised OER training courses.

Learn more about the training measures here (https://www.openeducation.at/qualifizierung/)