More and more uni­ver­si­ties are com­mit­ting to open­ness and want to send a sig­nal to teach­ing staff and other uni­ver­sity mem­bers that they sup­port the cre­ation and shar­ing of OER (Open Edu­ca­tional Resources). But what should such a pol­icy actu­ally con­tain or reg­u­late? What needs to be con­sid­ered from a legal per­spec­tive? And which stake­hold­ers should be involved in its cre­ation so that every­one pulls in the same direc­tion dur­ing imple­men­ta­tion and the pol­icy does­n’t just exist on paper?

By devel­op­ing and adopt­ing an OER pol­icy, uni­ver­si­ties can pro­vide their employ­ees with a clear frame­work and actively posi­tion them­selves in favor of free access to edu­ca­tion and knowl­edge — but the path to such a pol­icy and its design can be as var­ied and diverse as the uni­ver­sity land­scape itself. How­ever, when a uni­ver­sity wants to set out on the path to an OER pol­icy, there are always sim­i­lar ques­tions: Where and how do I start? Which pri­or­i­ties should be set and which legal aspects are impor­tant? Which stake­hold­ers need to be involved?

There are hardly any clearly defined answers to these ques­tions, but there is expe­ri­ence of how uni­ver­si­ties have answered these ques­tions indi­vid­u­ally for them­selves. A work­ing group involv­ing sev­eral OER net­works — the Lower Sax­ony OER por­tal twillo, the ORCA.nrw net­work and the HAWK Hildesheim/Holzminden/Göttingen — has eval­u­ated such expe­ri­ences and devel­oped an inter­ac­tive guide that also incor­po­rates feed­back from net­work­ing meet­ings of pol­icy activists.

In the online event on e‑teaching.org, two mem­bers of the work­ing team present the OER pol­icy kit, which is to be under­stood as a guide to the pol­icy process. It com­prises seven steps that describe pos­si­ble stages and are sup­ple­mented with addi­tional, reusable mate­ri­als, e.g. a sam­ple OER pol­icy or mail tem­plates. After the pre­sen­ta­tion, there will be an oppor­tu­nity to ask ques­tions and give feed­back as well as to dis­cuss your own expe­ri­ence with OER pol­icy processes with the speaker Yulia Loose (ELAN e.V.) and the speaker Frank Homp (Uni­ver­sity of Biele­feld) or all par­tic­i­pants.