Relaunch of our OER planning guide

twillo’s OER plan­ning guide sup­ports authors in the con­cep­tion and cre­ation of their OER mate­ri­als. Depend­ing on the selected mate­r­ial type and license, and whether third-party con­tent is used, the plan­ning aid offers spe­cific advice. In addi­tion to licens­ing law, the guides that are ulti­mately issued also pro­vide infor­ma­tion on didac­tics and design. The plan­ning aid has been sup­port­ing inter­ested par­ties since 2020. The plan­ning aid has now been revised to make the cre­ation of OER even eas­ier.

The focus of the relaunch of the OER plan­ning aid is the revi­sion of the wiz­ard: The range of mate­ri­als for which the OER plan­ning aid offers sup­port now largely fol­lows that of the OERSI search index, as of mid-2022. By using iden­ti­cal ter­mi­nol­ogy both in the search on twillo and dur­ing the con­cep­tion of OER, a fur­ther step is to be taken to offer our vis­i­tors a uni­form expe­ri­ence.

In the course of the revi­sion, a descrip­tion of the respec­tive types of mate­r­ial will also be included in the OER plan­ning aid and the result­ing guide­lines. This is because the OERSI terms offer scope for inter­pre­ta­tion — often appar­ent after a brief, exem­plary search. This is of course also the result of the diver­sity of dif­fer­ent sub­ject areas, dis­ci­plines and our users.

Inter­ested par­ties should there­fore be offered an overview of pos­si­ble inter­pre­ta­tions of the mate­r­ial types — as far as pos­si­ble and rea­son­able, with­out any claim to com­plete­ness: The mate­r­ial type “sim­u­la­tion” can be a ref­er­ence to inter­ac­tiv­ity. How­ever, sim­u­la­tion can also be under­stood as mate­r­ial that doc­u­ments a sim­u­la­tion and helps sub­se­quent users to real­ize a sim­u­la­tion (sim­i­lar to a sim­u­la­tion game).

How the OER planning aid works

The OER project of inter­ested par­ties is deter­mined by suc­ces­sively query­ing the para­me­ters of a planned OER mate­r­ial. Poten­tial OER cre­ators can ini­tially choose from almost the entire spec­trum of mate­r­ial types that can be found in the search envi­ron­ment on twillo or the OERSI.

The next step is to ask whether third-party con­tent is to be incor­po­rated or edited in the intended work. The license of the third-party mate­r­ial should now be spec­i­fied by the user or — in the case of the inte­gra­tion of third-party mate­ri­als or projects to be real­ized with­out the help of third-party mate­ri­als — it must be decided which license the result­ing over­all work should have.

Based on this input, a guide to the spe­cific issue is com­piled on an ad hoc basis.

OER planning aid: Information beyond licensing issues

In accor­dance with the spec­i­fied para­me­ters, license infor­ma­tion is ini­tially pro­vided in the guides. How­ever, didac­tic areas of appli­ca­tion of the selected mate­r­ial are also dis­cussed and design tips are pro­vided. With regard to the mate­r­ial type video, it is stated, among other things, that the medium is suit­able for ‘visu­al­iz­ing’ time and depict­ing processes. In the OER plan­ning guide, 21 types of mate­r­ial are dealt with where didac­tic advice is use­ful. In addi­tion, as far as the type of mate­r­ial allows, ref­er­ence is made to tools that can be used to real­ize the mate­r­ial. File for­mats are dis­cussed in which a work can be made avail­able as OER on twillo as openly as pos­si­ble.

The guide­lines issued by the OER plan­ning aid for the selected type of mate­r­ial and the envis­aged sce­nario can be down­loaded as a PDF and Doc file. This means that the guide can also be con­sulted later and, if nec­es­sary, offline dur­ing the con­cep­tion and cre­ation of an OER; addi­tions can be made directly in the spirit of OER. The “New” but­ton starts a new run through the OER plan­ning aid, because after all, OER is always mov­ing for­ward.

Speak­ing of fur­ther: We are pleased to be able to con­tinue to sup­port you more than ever with our OER plan­ning aid. We look for­ward to your visit: Plan your OER project now.