If you are active in teaching, re-using the educational materials of other teachers can bring you some advantages. At the same time, you can help others if you also share your self-created teaching materials with third parties. That is why the Open Economics Guide of the ZBW now has a new topic area on Open Educational Resources (OER)! Here you can find out how you can directly benefit from open teaching. At the same time, useful practical tips will help you get started with the creation of open teaching resources yourself.
OER refers to educational materials that are published under an open licence that allows for free use, editing and redistribution. In recent years, OER have gained importance across disciplines, among other things due to high costs for textbooks, especially in the USA. Also – and especially – in economics.
Open access to re-usable educational materials offers benefits for both learners and teachers. These include: eliminated acquisition costs, universal and rapid availability, significant time savings and quite flexible adaptability. Due to the multiple feedback possibilities, a potentially higher quality is also possible. In addition, OER can contribute to reputation enhancement among teachers, as the content they create can reach more people and thus achieve more visibility.
The new content
The Open Economics Guide looks at searching, creating and publishing Open Educational Resources. Among other things, you will learn:
- How to recognise Open Educational Resources
- How to use Open Educational Resources in practice
- How to carry out quality control of OER
- What a search strategy for OER can look like
- How to create OER yourself
- What selection criteria there are for OER tools
- What to consider when publishing
With the new topic area on OER, the Open Economics Guide now comprises four main topics with Open Access, Open Data and Open Science. In addition, the platform offers a constantly growing catalogue of free Open Science Tools as well as an events calendar and a regular newsletter.
Get started right away and see what background information, tips and tools the Open Economics Guide has to offer you on OER.