Openness and OER in Germany: University of Hamburg’s engagement towards a culture of Open Educationa Members : #OER17

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Thu, Apr 6 2017, 2:50pm – 3:50pm

Authors: Tobias Steiner, Kerstin Mayrberger, and Christina Schwalbe

Room: Conf. Hall

Theme: Policy & Practice

Type: Presentations

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Description

While the topics of Digitization and Digital Education have been introduced into German university strategies during the last fifteen years and on national, regional, and institutional levels, Germany does not have a strong Open Education tradition (Zawacki-Richter 2016).

Early adopters have begun to work with OER for several years now, but larger-scale incentives towards an organized development, production and dissemination of OER as a means to foster an awareness towards Open Educational Practices (OEP) has been injected into the German HE sector only fairly recently through national programs sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and similar initiatives (BMBF 2016).

As our proposed presentation will sketch out, the Hamburg metropolitan area has been on the forefront of this newly-evolving Open Education universe within the German context: with the inception of a so-called ‘Hamburg Open Online University’ (HOOU), the City of Hamburg decidedly pushes for the development of an open online platform that offers OER provided by a conglomerate of Hamburg’s public HEIs – including the University of Hamburg – and with both students and the general citizenry as its target group. Parallel to that, a new project labelled ‘SynLLOER’ (Synergien für Lehren und Lernen durch OER / Synergies for Teaching and Learning through OER; beginning its work in January 2017) is tasked with raising awareness for OER, and with providing help and advice for a wide range of institutions on the levels of primary and secondary education as well as the Higher Education sector and with a particular focus on teacher training.

Bringing together the larger context of Germany’s national policies as put forward by the BMBF in September 2016, and the current implications those policies have both on the regional level of the metropolitan area of Hamburg, but also on the institutional level of the University of Hamburg, the paper will discuss the variety of Germany-specific challenges that SynTLOER and HOOU have to face in order to successfully raise awareness towards interdisciplinary open education. Considering a multitude of challenging factors ranging from complex legal issues (e.g. an absence of ‘fair use’ for remixing media content in Germany), over institutional, technical and infrastructural to sociocultural and economic issues, the presentation will identify the ways in which those projects have pushed for an implementation of OEP through raising awareness for Openness and OER in Hamburg.

As Mayrberger (2016) has argued, tackling those issues is a complex, but worthwhile task that allows for an overall development towards furthering digital literacy of students and teachers that implements Open Educational Practices within the context of Digital Teaching and Learning.