Presentation of the twillo portal at the LOST workshop at Leuphana University

How open­ness can become a new leit­mo­tif in man­age­ment and orga­ni­za­tional research and how incen­tive instru­ments can help.

In recent years, numer­ous projects have been sup­ported by the twillo net­work as part of the “OER for Higher Edu­ca­tion” fund­ing mea­sure of the Lower Sax­ony Min­istry of Sci­ence and Cul­ture, includ­ing the “Qual­i­ta­tive Research Meth­ods for Respon­si­ble Man­age­ment Edu­ca­tion” project at the Insti­tute of Man­age­ment and Orga­ni­za­tion at Leuphana Uni­ver­sity of Lüneb­urg. As part of a two-day research-ori­ented work­shop on “Orga­ni­za­tion Stud­ies on Open­ness — The­ory, Research Prac­tice and Teach­ing” (10th LOST Work­shop), the project man­agers, includ­ing Pro­fes­sor Han­nah Trit­tin-Ulbrich and Johanne Düster­beck, gave the twillo net­work the oppor­tu­nity to present the twillo por­tal to an inter­na­tional audi­ence of pro­fes­sors, post­docs and doc­toral stu­dents at Leuphana Uni­ver­sity on 14 and 15 Sep­tem­ber 2023. The work­shop focused on “open­ness” as a new “leit­mo­tif” in man­age­ment and orga­ni­za­tional research. One aim was to gain valu­able insights into how the invited aca­d­e­mics engage in research and teach­ing.

Klaus Wan­nemacher (HIS-HE) spoke about Open Edu­ca­tional Resources (OER) and the twillo por­tal in a ses­sion on the first day of the work­shop, which was ded­i­cated to the topic of “Open­ness in Teach­ing and Edu­ca­tion: An Open Edu­ca­tional Resource Project by the LOST Group”. Johanne Düster­beck (Leuphana Uni­ver­sity) gave an overview of the dig­i­tal LOST lec­ture series on qual­i­ta­tive research meth­ods, which was cre­ated as part of the afore­men­tioned fund­ing project. Wan­nemacher placed the twillo por­tal’s offer­ings in the nation­wide land­scape of OER por­tals and pre­sented twillo’s struc­tures and func­tions as well as cur­rent usage sta­tis­tics. Düster­beck then spoke about the equally impres­sive and exten­sive open online lec­ture series on qual­i­ta­tive research meth­ods, in which numer­ous lec­tur­ers in orga­ni­za­tional research have par­tic­i­pated and which will be avail­able on the twillo por­tal.

In a detailed dis­cus­sion on the oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges of the devel­op­ment and use of OER in the higher edu­ca­tion sec­tor dur­ing this part of the event, the gen­eral con­di­tions for revis­ing OER, the advanced tech­ni­cal inte­gra­tion of the OER por­tals of the fed­eral states and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of open­ing twillo to inter­na­tional con­tent were dis­cussed. Sev­eral work­shop par­tic­i­pants empha­sized the impor­tance of incen­tive instru­ments and expressed a strong inter­est in con­tin­u­ing the OER fund­ing mea­sures of the state of Lower Sax­ony. The option offered by the Ger­man National Library of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy (TIB) to label OER uploaded to twillo with a Dig­i­tal Object Iden­ti­fier (DOI) — sim­i­lar to the prac­tice for sci­en­tific pub­li­ca­tions — was also received with par­tic­u­lar inter­est. Dur­ing the course of the event, it became clear that the twillo por­tal makes a valu­able con­tri­bu­tion to open­ing up teach­ing in man­age­ment and orga­ni­za­tional sci­ence and how impres­sive the results of the “OER for the higher edu­ca­tion sec­tor” fund­ing mea­sure are.