twillo.de provides teachers and universities in Lower Saxony with a central portal for open educational resources (OER). The platform provides free access to openly licensed educational materials that are expressly intended for use, editing and distribution. The aim of twillo is to strengthen open teaching practices and the sharing and (re)use of high-quality educational materials, and to support university lecturers in the sustainable design of digital teaching.
"Open educational resources are a central foundation for sustainable university teaching – in terms of subject matter, didactics and society," explains Noreen Krause, twillo project manager at TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology. "They enable teachers to develop and share materials that are precisely tailored to their needs, while at the same time promoting future skills such as collaborative working, licensing and copyright expertise, and the reflective use of generative AI in teaching."
In addition to the OER repository, twillo offers extensive consulting and training services. These include workshops, exchange formats and individual support – for example, on the legally compliant creation of open educational materials, the interactive preparation of learning modules and the responsible use of generative AI in teaching and learning contexts. In this way, twillo supports teachers and service institutions in utilizing new technologies in a didactically meaningful way and integrating them into existing teaching concepts.
Another focus of twillo is strengthening digital sovereignty in higher education teaching. Open standards, transparent licensing models and sustainable infrastructures help to reduce dependencies on proprietary services and keep educational materials available in the long term. At the same time, open educational materials and practices promote democratic skills because knowledge becomes transparently accessible, verifiable and shareable.
"Against the backdrop of dynamic technological developments, open and reliable framework conditions for teaching are particularly important," says Krause. "twillo combines infrastructure, expertise and exchange – and thus creates the conditions for the sustainable further development of open teaching."
A central component of this further development is the initiative twilloHub. With this service, twillo makes its proven technical infrastructure available to other federal states and educational institutions. The aim is to facilitate the development of sustainable OER infrastructures and to invest more resources in consulting, training and community work. A prime example is ORCA.nrw, which has been using the twillo infrastructure for its own state portal since 2024. Further collaborations are in the pipeline.
twillo is being further developed by TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, the E-Learning Academic Network Lower Saxony (elan e.V.), the University of Osnabrück and the HIS Institute for Higher Education Development (HIS-HE) in order to expand and establish the portal on a sustainable basis. The project is funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture and is currently in its second funding phase. The aim is to subsequently establish it as a permanent service at the TIB.
