It is quite a challenge to make OER a success. Fortunately, higher education in the Netherlands has united itself in a cooperative association and with funding made available by the Dutch government sharing and (re)use of OER is becoming a succes. The presenters of this session, Lieke Rensink and Michel Jansen, are the lucky one’s who have been building a national community, promoting working together on OER in professional communities and developed several products that stimulate the use of OER! All together with this community!
National OER CommunityOn a national level, 56 HE institutions work together in a community around OER. We are building a knowledge center on digital learning materials, which has a network function to facilitate collaboration and where supporting materials are openly available.
With the community we discovered the biggest barriers to make OER successful. The following practical roadmaps (www.surf.nl/en/open-educational-resources-roadmaps) that everyone can use within their own educational context have been developed:
- Introduction to OER
- OER policy Roadmap (only in Dutch)
- OER Professional community Roadmap
- Quality Assurance OER Roadmap
- Professional Vocabulary Roadmap (only in Dutch)
- Workshop development Roadmap
- OER in practice (only in Dutch)
Professional Communities work on OER
If you create, share and reuse open educational resources, it is absolutely essential to collaborate with other lecturers. Collaboration becomes easier in an active professional community. In the Netherlands we stimulate professional communities to work together and build a collection of open education resources together. In a funding program in the Netherlands 19 professional communities (and a multitude of lecturers) work together and experiment together what works best in this collaboration on OER. From Nurses to Engineers, from law to old Greek and Hebrew.
In 2020 SURF, together with experts on professional communities and technology enhanced learning and several active professional communities, developed the roadmap ‘Build a professional community around open education resources’ that leads you through the steps that communities in the Netherlands take to collaborate around OER: www.surf.nl/en/roadmap-build-a-professional-community-around-open-education-resources.
In the session we will give highlights of the program in the Netherlands, provide insight in the why and how on working on a collection of OER within professional communities and a community manager will exchange challenges and share tips and tricks in how to make the professional community successful working together on OER. We also like to discuss with participants and collect their experiences and practical tips.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Understand the power of a national Community around OER
- Feel the power of professional communities and the need to support them with knowledge, infrastructure and money
- Use the Roadmap: build a professional community around open education resources so that they can support and facilitate professional communities
- Find and use one of the roadmaps around OER (Introduction OER, OER policy, OER Professional community, Quality Assurance OER, Professional Vocabulary and Workshop development)
