Open educational resources: Vision and advantages
Open educational resources (OER) offer lecturers and education support officers several options, such as presenting themselves as education experts or improving the quality of the educational resources.
Vision and developments
In its Strategic Plan 2025, Utrecht University aims at developing storing and making available reusable digital educational sources. Also the Plan of Action of the Open Science Programme and the Utrecht University Library Policy Plan aim at promoting open educational resources.
In addition the Universities of the Netherlands signed the Statement and report on the National Approach to digital and open educational resources in 2022, in which is agreed to work together on creating, reusing and sharing (open) educational resources. In 2023 Npuls was started, a programme to promote digitisation in education which is joined by all public vocational and higher education institutions. One of the core themes of the programme is supporting lecturers in developing, sharing and using open educational resources.
Within the Dutch context open educational resources can be shared and found via edusources for instance, a SURF platform mainly focused on educational resources for higher education institutions. The WikiWijs Maken platform (in Dutch only) focuses on secondary schools and vocational education. There are international platforms such as OER Commons, MERLOT, and OASIS for finding and sharing open educational resources.
Advantages
Developing and using open educational resources has several advantages:
- Quality improvement, because lecturers learn from and get inspired by each other’s work, and so increase their expertise
- Recognition as education expert: lecturers and support officers can show their expertise by means of their open resources
- Saving time: existing educational resources can easily be used in their own teaching activities and so ease the workload of lecturers
- Saving money: reuse of open educational resources is free of charge and forms an alternative for resources that have to be paid for
- Students, or other interested parties, can consult educational resources on their own to further develop their (teaching) skills.