Providing infrastructure
About a technical infrastructure for OER at your institution
Planning
In order to plan technical OER infrastructures on a realistic and solid basis, strategic decisions need to be made in time. These concern not only technical circumstances such as the choice of repository software or a metadata standard, but also organisational and legal ones.
Depending on the requirements and resources, the implementation of an OER infrastructure can be designed in many ways. Possibilities, needs and expectations of all stakeholders should therefore be clarified at an early stage.
Do you want to set up an infrastructure at your institution to store OER, make it findable and usable?
Do you want to make OER that you make available at your institution findable in the OERhub?
OER-Repositories
The basic requirements for an OER repository are almost identical to repositories in other fields: In an online accessible database, educational resources in different formats with metadata that is as meaningful as possible should be stored as permanently as possible and made available for viewing or downloading.
The following software products are used in the project:
- Phaidra (UW)
- Invenio (TUG)
- edu-sharing (UG, UIBK)
Information on the actual implementations as well as software solutions and best practice examples developed within the project are published in the project's technical knowledgebase. This mainly technical documentation represents the current state of knowledge and experience in the project and is continuously corrected and supplemented.
OER-Plugin
The Open Educational Resources (OER) plugin, which is constantly being further developed by Graz University of Technology, offers a graphical user interface (GUI) for sharing OER from defined Moodle courses to the public. Teaching staff (the authors) decide which data from the Moodle course is to be released. In addition to releasing the data, the user interface also offers the option of editing the automatically created metadata. The purpose of this is to adapt the descriptions, which are kept very general and are valid for the whole course, to the individual data and thus make them more individual.
The OER plugin is made available to the open source community through a Git repository, which can be found on Github. The currently supported theme is the Moodle Boost theme.
Interested in an exchange?
Are you interested in setting up an OER repository or adapting a repository from the research data area for OER? We would be happy to clarify with you the requirements that OER places on these infrastructures. We look forward to hearing from you at office@openeducation.at.