Aftermath: OER Week Lucerne 2025 and the question of our openness competence
Certainly not because the (quite interesting) presentations, which were once again perfectly organised by Cinzia Gabellini and her team. But the serios of lectures offered a good overview of the current status and current developments in Open Educational Resources. Of course, this is something you are likely to get at most OER events in the well-connected OER community of the so-called DACH countries. In fact, this event proved once again that the OER movement remains highly vital internationally and that the cause of open education is more important than ever - in my opinion, strong arguments for engaging with OER, even if composites with "AI" currently dominate the discourse in higher education didactics. The entirety of the lectures also showed that there is no single path for higher education or education policy towards open education in general and OER in particular, but that the various national ways can turn out very differently. The fact that Switzerland and, above all, Austria seem to be following a very successful path is striking and can also be higlighted as a reason for Wuppertal teachers (and learners), as OER creators (or OER recipients), to explore the possibilities of other federal states or international neighbours.
At this point, however, I would like to take a closer look at one presentation from this year's Lucerne OER-lecture series, as it emphasised an aspect of OER that has received little attention to date. This is because the topic of OER is not limited to the creation of freely licensed teaching and learning materials, but also encompasses the fundamental examination of open educational practice - on the part of both teachers and learners. The latter has often been overlooked, but is all the more important when a university trains multipliers, as is the case in the numerous teaching degree programs at BUW, for example.
In his presentation "Open competencies as the basis for open education: opportunities and implementation", Dr Ronny Röwert from the Digital Learning Campus Schleswig-Holstein and member of the Bündniss Freie Bildung therefore called for open educational practices and attitudes among teachers and learners. A well-implemented, more open educational practice could be the central driver for contemporary education in a digitally characterised society. However, this is not automatic. What is needed is not only a fundamentally open, but also a reflective attitude and practice on the part of teachers in the first step and learners in the second step. Openness competences are therefore necessary for all those involved. However, previous competency frameworks for teachers or learners in the context of media pedagogy have hardly or not at all addressed the aspect of openness. In order to fill this gap, the Bündnis Freie Bildung, with the participation of other committed representatives of educational practice, has developed a model of openness competences for learners and teachers that is compatible with existing competence frameworks from various areas of education.
The openness competences are divided into three competence blocks - knowledge, skills and attitude - for both teachers and learners. Of course, other individual competences are clearly named within these, but they cannot be considered in detail here (see the model linked above). In addition to the three competence blocks, both teachers and learners have the goal of acting in the sense of open educational practice.
Teachers... | Learners... |
... use OER for their own teaching activities. ... collaborate with others and create material together. ... make their own materials available to others. ... pass on knowledge about freely licenced material to their own learners. ... make access to educational programmes accessible, participatory and democratic | ... use OER for their own learning. ... make their own media products available to others. ... learn in an open, participatory and democratic way. |
More important than this goal, however, seems to me to be a part of the path that is reflected in the attitude presented within the competency framework. For just as teachers should fundamentally (self-)critically reflect on their teaching, it is also helpful for OER creators to reflect on where OER can be used in their own teaching activities, how materials could be made usable for others, and where opportunities and limitations exist to make access to educational programmes participatory and democratic. Conversely, learners should also reflect on whether and where they want to use OER for their own learning or, if necessary, make their own media products (e.g. remixed OER) available to others. They should also develop a critical attitude in order to learn in an open, participative and democratic way.
If we want to follow the trend in higher education and focus more on student-centred teaching/learning formats, we will have no choice but to produce more educational materials in the sense outlined above on the part of lecturers - and to use and pass them on to students in a reflective manner. This requires openness competences that both teachers and students should adopt (if they have not already done so). On the part of teachers, this can be done by reflecting on their own understanding of teaching (and is possibly a nice personal exercise shortly before the start of the summer semester). However, students will rarely be given an intrinsically motivated impetus to deal with this. Providing this impetus and helping students to develop reflective learning behaviour could perhaps be a small additional task for you in your courses in the coming semester.
P.S.: If you have not yet dealt with OER, there will be an opportunity to do so in May as part of a SaPe workshop on the legal aspects of e-learning/OER . If you would like to take a closer look at the competency framework for openness competencies, you will find all the necessary materials on the website of the Bündnis Freie Bildung.
