Here’s to open education: twillo is celebrating its sixth birthday!

twillo offi­cially went live in the spring of 2020. Today—six years later—with more than 5,600 openly licensed teach­ing and learn­ing mate­ri­als, over 2,200 reg­is­tered users, and more than 155 affil­i­ated insti­tu­tions, the por­tal has become a key player in open higher edu­ca­tion in Lower Sax­ony and beyond. As a cen­ter of excel­lence, twillo reaches well over 1,000 peo­ple from the fields of research and teach­ing each year with its edu­ca­tional and advi­sory ser­vices. Let’s cel­e­brate six years of open edu­ca­tion by tak­ing a look back at the past and look­ing ahead to the present together.

How it all began: The story behind it

The twillo ini­tia­tive was launched in 2019 as part of a col­lab­o­ra­tive project funded by the Lower Sax­ony Min­istry of Sci­ence and Cul­ture (MWK) and involv­ing the Leib­niz Infor­ma­tion Cen­tre for Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy (TIB), the E‑Learning Aca­d­e­mic Net­work Lower Sax­ony (elan e.V.), the HIS Insti­tute for Higher Edu­ca­tion Devel­op­ment (HIS-HE), the Uni­ver­sity of Applied Sci­ences Emden/Leer, the Uni­ver­sity of Osnabrück (UOS), and the Stud.IP asso­ci­a­tion.
Dur­ing the first fund­ing phase (2019–2023), activ­i­ties focused in par­tic­u­lar on devel­op­ing a reli­able tech­ni­cal infra­struc­ture for host­ing mate­ri­als, as well as build­ing an active user com­mu­nity and pro­vid­ing sup­port for all legal, tech­ni­cal, and ped­a­gog­i­cal issues related to the use of OER.
Dur­ing the cur­rent sec­ond fund­ing phase (2023–2027), the infra­struc­ture itself, as well as the portal’s advi­sory and edu­ca­tional ser­vices, will be com­pre­hen­sively fur­ther devel­oped and expanded by four con­sor­tium part­ners (TIB, elan e.V., HIS-HE, and UOS). In addi­tion, spe­cial atten­tion will be given to build­ing cross-state net­works.

What Matters: Values and Priorities

The twillo team actively sup­ports the cre­ation of an open edu­ca­tional ecosys­tem at var­i­ous lev­els. Its over­ar­ch­ing goal is to con­tribute to free and inclu­sive access to edu­ca­tion, infor­ma­tion, and knowl­edge. twillo serves both as a plat­form for pub­lish­ing OER for higher edu­ca­tion and as a cen­ter of exper­tise where edu­ca­tors and learn­ers can receive sup­port, advice, and guid­ance on all mat­ters related to Open Sci­ence. The prin­ci­ple of open­ness also applies to twillo itself: The por­tal is devel­oped as an open-source project, and all project mate­ri­als are made avail­able under an open license.
In terms of con­tent, twillo addresses legal, ped­a­gog­i­cal, and tech­ni­cal aspects of open edu­ca­tional design. Open edu­ca­tion does not develop in iso­la­tion from cur­rent tech­no­log­i­cal and social dis­courses. On the con­trary, it adapts dynam­i­cally and flex­i­bly to cur­rent devel­op­ments. twillo specif­i­cally addresses the prac­ti­cal needs of higher edu­ca­tion teach­ing. While in recent years—in addi­tion to the fun­da­men­tals of work­ing with OER—the devel­op­ment of insti­tu­tional frame­works and their imple­men­ta­tion within OER poli­cies at uni­ver­si­ties took on par­tic­u­lar rel­e­vance, in 2026 the project will place spe­cial empha­sis on cur­rent issues regard­ing the legally com­pli­ant and reflec­tive use of gen­er­a­tive AI in the cre­ation of OER. Fur­ther­more, the topic of dig­i­tal sov­er­eignty is com­ing more into focus: that is, the ques­tion of how open, trans­par­ent, and sus­tain­able infra­struc­tures, tools, and work­ing meth­ods can make uni­ver­si­ties more inde­pen­dent and capa­ble of tak­ing action. twillo is also dri­ving inno­va­tion in the area of future skills by sup­port­ing instruc­tors in inte­grat­ing open­ness, col­lab­o­ra­tion, legal judg­ment, and a crit­i­cal approach to dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies into their teach­ing.

The technical side: Homepage, OERSI, and edu-sharing

The twillo por­tal con­sists of three inter­con­nected com­po­nents. On the twillo home­page, those inter­ested in OER will find all the basic infor­ma­tion they need to get started with OER. This includes infor­ma­tion on the legally com­pli­ant and/or tech­ni­cal prepa­ra­tion of mate­ri­als as OER, as well as instruc­tions for pub­lish­ing mate­ri­als on twillo. Over 60 (blog) posts address cur­rent dis­courses in higher edu­ca­tion. Top­ics include the imple­men­ta­tion of insti­tu­tional frame­works for OER devel­op­ment (OER pol­icy), qual­ity cri­te­ria suit­able for eval­u­at­ing or assess­ing open edu­ca­tional resources, and the legally com­pli­ant and ped­a­gog­i­cal use of gen­er­a­tive AI in OER devel­op­ment. Teach­ers and learn­ers receive con­crete sup­port through a vari­ety of prac­ti­cal FAQs, short explana­tory videos, as well as tem­plates and guide­lines (e.g., on the trans­fer of usage rights or con­sent for photo/video record­ings).

The portal’s resource search inte­grates the Open Edu­ca­tional Resources Search Index (OERSI)—a cen­tral search engine for open edu­ca­tional resources in higher edu­ca­tion that has been jointly offered by the Uni­ver­sity Library Cen­ter of North Rhine-West­phalia (hbz) and the TIB since 2020. To pro­vide com­pre­hen­sive search results, OERSI searches—in addi­tion to twillo—a wide range of dis­trib­uted, national, and inter­na­tional sources, thereby offer­ing access to approx­i­mately 100,000 OERs. All plan­ning and devel­op­ment is openly doc­u­mented on the Git­Lab plat­form. Feed­back and active par­tic­i­pa­tion in the fur­ther devel­op­ment of the ser­vice are wel­come.

Both the home­page and the OERSI search are acces­si­ble to any­one inter­ested with­out log­ging in. Only when fac­ulty mem­bers wish to upload mate­ri­als them­selves is it nec­es­sary to log in to the portal—the edu-shar­ing soft­ware. Employ­ees of many uni­ver­si­ties in Lower Sax­ony and North Rhine-West­phalia can access the por­tal via sin­gle sign-on using their uni­ver­sity ID; oth­ers can obtain access by sub­mit­ting a request to the sup­port team.

After log­ging in for the first time, users are directed to their per­sonal work­space. Here, they can either upload mate­ri­als or—if the mate­ri­als are already avail­able online elsewhere—link to them. In addi­tion, twillo offers the abil­ity to design inter­ac­tive H5P ele­ments directly within the por­tal. After upload­ing mate­ri­als, users are guided through a form to enter meta­data and select an appro­pri­ate license (e.g., Cre­ative Com­mons, MIT, or Apache) for their con­tent. Related mate­ri­als can be grouped into series or com­piled into col­lec­tions. Users have full con­trol over when their mate­ri­als are pub­lished. A Dig­i­tal Object Iden­ti­fier (DOI), i.e., a per­ma­nent iden­ti­fier for teach­ing and learn­ing mate­ri­als, can be requested on twillo after pub­li­ca­tion, if needed.

Content: Educational and Counseling Services

twillo offers a wide range of free edu­ca­tional and advi­sory resources to sup­port edu­ca­tors and learn­ers across all areas of open edu­ca­tion. These resources include intro­duc­tory courses on OER cre­ation, ses­sions address­ing spe­cific ques­tions about copy­right and licens­ing law, and var­i­ous “Tooltimes” where free soft­ware, tools, and ser­vices for open media pro­duc­tion are pre­sented and tested col­lab­o­ra­tively. Since the cre­ation of mate­ri­als can poten­tially be sim­pli­fied through the use of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, twillo addresses this topic exten­sively through work­shops and dis­cus­sion forums.
For indi­vid­ual ques­tions, the twillo team is avail­able in per­son dur­ing the weekly online con­sul­ta­tion hour “twillo Thurs­day” with­out prior reg­is­tra­tion. Alter­na­tively, the sup­port team can be con­tacted at any time via email at info@twillo.de.

In addi­tion to the events it orga­nizes itself, the twillo team fre­quently and enthu­si­as­ti­cally par­tic­i­pates in exter­nal events hosted by the OER com­mu­nity (e.g., OER­camp, OER im Blick), pro­fes­sional con­fer­ences (e.g., Media Lit­er­acy Day), and teach­ing sym­po­siums, offer­ing pre­sen­ta­tions, work­shops, and oppor­tu­ni­ties for dis­cus­sion.
A par­tic­u­lar mile­stone in 2023 was the con­fer­ence “Open Up – Strate­gies for the Dig­i­tal­iza­tion of Higher Edu­ca­tion in Lower Sax­ony,” orga­nized by twillo itself. The aim of the event was to fos­ter an under­stand­ing of the chal­lenges of dig­i­tal­iza­tion and to stim­u­late dis­course on the frame­work con­di­tions and incen­tives for open­ing up dig­i­tal teach­ing mate­ri­als. Over the course of two days, the approx­i­mately 100 par­tic­i­pants were offered oppor­tu­ni­ties for net­work­ing and exchange. The pro­gram ranged from keynotes and panel dis­cus­sions to a “mar­ket of oppor­tu­ni­ties.”

The Education Policy Arena: The twillo Team Is Getting Involved

With the goal of fully estab­lish­ing the use and cre­ation of open edu­ca­tional resources in higher edu­ca­tion, twillo is in con­stant dia­logue with a wide range of national and inter­na­tional OER stake­hold­ers. As a mem­ber of the coop­er­a­tion net­work Through “OER-Enabling Infra­struc­tures and Ser­vices” (KNOER), twillo is actively work­ing along­side other man­dated OER ini­tia­tives to pro­mote cross-state net­work­ing and the con­sol­i­da­tion of dig­i­tal teach­ing and learn­ing infra­struc­tures and ser­vices that sup­port OER. The net­work not only facil­i­tates the exchange of expe­ri­ences but also enables joint advo­cacy at the fed­eral level. This allows for the joint devel­op­ment and imple­men­ta­tion of inno­v­a­tive OER solu­tions in higher edu­ca­tion.

twillo also sup­ports

• help­ing to shape an open edu­ca­tional land­scape as a mem­ber of the Alliance for Free Edu­ca­tion,
• the devel­op­ment and imple­men­ta­tion of uni­form meta­data stan­dards as part of the DINI AG KIM,
• the fur­ther expan­sion of access to higher edu­ca­tion and the devel­op­ment of stan­dards for tech­ni­cal OER infra­struc­tures through par­tic­i­pa­tion in OER-RePo AG, as well as
• cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to max­i­mize the use and reuse of OER and OEP for every­one within the frame­work of ENOEL SPARC.

In 2024, project man­ager Noreen Krause was appointed to the OER Advi­sory Board of the Fed­eral Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion, Fam­ily Affairs, Senior Cit­i­zens, Women, and Youth (BMBFSFJ). This is an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary, expert advi­sory body focused on OER, Open Edu­ca­tional Prac­tices (OEP), and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in the con­text of Open Edu­ca­tion (OE). The Advi­sory Board makes an impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion to shap­ing the BMBFSFJ’s OER strat­egy: With its broad exper­tise and diverse stake­holder per­spec­tives, it helps iden­tify chal­lenges, oppor­tu­ni­ties, and trends in the afore­men­tioned areas and develop strate­gic rec­om­men­da­tions for the Min­istry.

Since 2022, Noreen Krause has also been an active mem­ber of the OER Advi­sory Board of the Forum Neue Medien in der Lehre Aus­tria asso­ci­a­tion. This inter­na­tional body assesses whether edu­ca­tional pro­grams offered by uni­ver­si­ties meet the cri­te­ria for the award­ing of OER cer­tifi­cates.

Well-connected: The twilloHub Initiative’s partnerships

At the state level, a large num­ber of por­tals and plat­forms are oper­ated, most of which func­tion largely inde­pen­dently of one another. By estab­lish­ing the twillo­Hub, the TIB is mak­ing an impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion to the sus­tain­able tech­ni­cal inter­con­nec­tion of these infra­struc­tures. The ser­vice offer­ing enables state ini­tia­tives or insti­tu­tions to use the twillo back­end as well as the TIB AV Por­tal—a spe­cial­ized plat­form for edu­ca­tional films in sci­ence. Thus, twillo­Hub offers coop­er­a­tion part­ners the sig­nif­i­cant advan­tage of not hav­ing to first set up their own infra­struc­ture for pro­vid­ing OER, which would be both labor-inten­sive and costly.

In 2024, the first offi­cial cross-state twillo­Hub part­ner­ship was launched between TIB and the Open Resources Cam­pus NRW (ORCA.nrw). All con­tent pre­vi­ously stored on ORCA’s own infra­struc­ture was migrated to twillo and the AV por­tal. In addi­tion, approx­i­mately 40 uni­ver­si­ties in North Rhine-West­phalia were con­nected to twillo, enabling instruc­tors and stu­dents to log in to the OER por­tal via sin­gle sign-on using their uni­ver­sity cre­den­tials. To ensure the best pos­si­ble sup­port for ORCA users, ORCA.nrw’s net­work offices and staff main­tain close com­mu­ni­ca­tion with TIB’s sup­port team. The col­lab­o­ra­tion between ORCA.nrw and TIB rep­re­sents the first step toward a net­worked infra­struc­ture for open higher edu­ca­tion mate­ri­als in Ger­many that can respond flex­i­bly to the needs of fac­ulty and stu­dents. It serves as a model for future col­lab­o­ra­tions and paves the way for a sus­tain­able and future-ori­ented open edu­ca­tional ecosys­tem.

Active Collaboration: The OER Community

Open edu­ca­tion thrives on peo­ple who share knowl­edge, exchange expe­ri­ences, and work together to find effec­tive solu­tions. That is why twillo places a strong empha­sis on com­mu­nity build­ing. Dif­fer­ent for­mats, top­ics, and oppor­tu­ni­ties for par­tic­i­pa­tion come together like the cells of a hon­ey­comb: each cell con­tributes its own part, is con­tin­u­ously nur­tured, and is brought to life by many ded­i­cated par­tic­i­pants. It is pre­cisely this inter­ac­tion that cre­ates the momen­tum that builds vis­i­bil­ity, fos­ters net­work­ing, and con­tin­u­ally gen­er­ates new ideas for open higher edu­ca­tion.

Last but not least

Six years of twillo show that open edu­ca­tion is not a fin­ished project, but a dynamic field that relies on com­mit­ment, coop­er­a­tion, and reli­able sup­port. With every new tech­ni­cal and social devel­op­ment, new ques­tions arise, but so do new oppor­tu­ni­ties. At the same time, the com­mu­nity that makes OER vis­i­ble in higher edu­ca­tion, devel­ops it fur­ther, and brings it to life con­tin­ues to grow. For open edu­ca­tion to real­ize its full poten­tial, it will con­tinue to need strong net­works, pro­fes­sional guid­ance, and cen­tral agen­cies that reli­ably sup­port uni­ver­si­ties and instruc­tors.

Join our com­mu­nity! We look for­ward to receiv­ing your sub­mis­sions!