Publishing open educational resources
Open Educational Resources are resources that are available openly and free of charge. They give lecturers and education support officers the opportunity to use and build upon each other’s work.
Utrecht University Library supports lecturers who want to publish self-created open educational resources. To this end, Utrecht University has a license on edusources, SURF’s national platform offering open educational resources to educational institutions.
Edusources and SURFsharekit
Publishing educational resources in edusources is done via the SURFsharekit, an online depot, also containing educational resources. After material has been uploaded in the SURFsharekit, it can be shared through edusources. SURF has several user manuals on how to upload and publish educational resources.
Please note, as a UU lecturer you log in to the SURFsharekit. The materials from the SURFsharekit are shared via edusources. You will not be able to log in to edusources.
Preconditions
To safeguard the quality of the shared educational resources the library has laid down four preconditions. The educational resources:
- are published under an open license.
- observe the copyright of others.
- are provided with correctly filled in metadata fields (in the SURFsharekit).
- do not contain (sensitive) personal details.
More guidelines regarding didactics and form can be found in the Quality Model Open Educational Resources.
The library offers support on these topics. Do you want our advice on the options of open educational resources or do you encounter some issues? Please contact the library.
Publish open educational resources on GitHub
It is also possible to publish open educational resources on GitHub. This is an online platform that is used to publish code, software, and other documents. For example, Hugo Quené and Huub van den Bergh published the open textbook "Quantitative Methods and Statistics" on GitHub. Do you want to know more or get started yourself? Research data management support provides support for the use of GitHub.
Examples of open educational resources
Veterinary Online Collection
At the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine a course community of lecturers and education support officers collaborates with the University of Copenhagen and the University of Helsinki on the Veterinary Online Collection, creating semi open (open for persons requesting access) educational resources and publishing them via edusources. The collection consists of videos, assignments, pictures and modules.
Infovaders
The University Library also published educational resources openly, such as the information literacy game Infovaders. In this game, through solving dilemmas, students build up their own information landscape. Game materials are published with an open license, allowing reusers to make their own version of the game with their own dilemmas! Materials are available on edusources.
ShareStats
In cooperation with the University of Amsterdam, the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, the Rotterdam Erasmus University and SURF, lecturers and education support officers of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences work on a national database for statistics questions: ShareStats. This database consists of thousands of statistics questions from previous exams and assignments, with a lecturer version (to draw up exercises and tests) and a student version (for practicing purposes).