Creation of and collaboration on Open Educational Resources (OER)

Basic data for this project

Description

Open Educational Resources (OER) (i.e., educational resources published under licenses permitting the 5Rs of openness such as variants of Creative Commons licenses) promise to reduce entry barriers towards educational resources as well as to avoid redundant work when similar educational resources of high quality are created in different organizations. However, adoption of OER faces known challenges, and the ALMS framework provides evaluation criteria for the re-use of OER from a technical perspective. This project (whose start was made possible thanks to the freedom granted by a fellowship for innovation in digital university teaching funded by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and Stifterverband) establishes technical requirements for OER by an extension of the ALMS framework, taking concepts from software engineering and technical writing into account. Respecting these requirements, an infrastructure for the creation of and collaboration on OER is provided. Moreover, OER are published under the Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0 using the provided infrastructure. The infrastructure rests upon a newly developed Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), called emacs-reveal for the generation of HTML presentations with embedded audio explanations, which are suitable for self-study. The generation of HTML from simple text files (in org mode) takes place in a public GitLab infrastructure, increasing the software’s ease of use. OER are created and improved continuously, since April 2017 in particular for a lecture on Operating Systems following Max Hailperin’s OER textbook: Operating Systems and Middleware Supporting Controlled Interaction Next to Open Educational Resources (OER) for Operating Systems, further OER exist at Gitlab, such as a howto for emacs-reveal, an introduction to Git, an introduction to Docker, OER for Distributed Systems (basics, Internet, web and e-mail).