The OER Awards in Germany. Promoting #Open through awarding best practice [1909] Members : #OER18

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Thu, Apr 19 2018, 12:05pm – 1:05pm

Authors: Anja Lorenz, and Jöran Muuß-Merholz

Room: Cinema 2

Theme: Politics in Action

Type: Presentation

Description

The Ljubljana Action Plan 2017 puts a strong emphasis on “high quality” of OER (UNECO 2017), that is not a trivial issue when it comes to education (Ehlers 2009). The German “OER awards” aim at new ways of discussing and promoting OER.

Though Germany has been a latecomer to the OER scene, there is a strong OER community now (Orr, Neumann, Muuß-Merholz 2017). To promote the idea and the sharing of OER in German-speaking regions, there have been OER awards in early 2016 and in November 2017.

Overview

The OER awards highlight the efforts of OER practitioners in more than 10 categories. Furthermore, there was an audience award in 2016 that was linked to a funding for the best OER idea, that must be realized with the prize money, and special awards by the jury in 2016 and 2017 without submission options.

Criteria

A special focus was set on the elaboration of definitions for requirements and criteria. Contributions must be

Open as described in the Open Definition (published by Open Knowledge International).
Educational as in “designed for educational purposes”.
Resource in the sense of “delimitable and transferable”. This explicitly includes software and concepts.
German, i.e. in German language or (!) predominantly developed in a German language country.

In 2017 the following criteria were used for assessment:

temporal relevance (must date from later than early 2016)
participation and collaboration in the making
didactic quality, innovative pedagogical settings
licencing
range, use, impact
potential for actual reuse
quality development and quality assurance
technical quality
X-factor (wild card for positive qualities not covered in the criteria mentioned above)

Quality of the content regarded from a subject perspective was NOT among the criteria.

It should be noted that these criteria were developed in an open and collaborative process among a jury of OER experts. All steps of the election processes were organized online as the jury never met before the ceremony. Supported by a moodle course and a set of Google Documents and Formulas, the process was adapted to the several steps and needs of the jury.

Outline of the Session

In our presentation we will give an overview on the idea and the process behind the OER award and show some statistics and figures. A special focus will be set on the community driven work within the “oer academy” in which the process, the criteria and the selection of awardees are discussed openly. Showcasing awarded projects will NOT be part of the presentation. We will instead focus on the question how an award can contribute to promoting the idea and the sharing of OER.

References

Ehlers, U. D. (2009). Understanding quality culture. Quality Assurance in Education, 17(4), 343-363.

Orr, D.; Neumann, J.; Muuß-Merholz, J. (2017). German OER Practices and Policy – from Bottom-up to Top-down Initiatives. http://iite.unesco.org/publications/3214746/

UNESCO (2017). “Ljubljana OER Action Plan 2017.” Adopted by the second World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress in Ljubljana in September 2017. https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/ljubljana_oer_action_plan_2017.pdf

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