The C3L has set itself the task of supporting and promoting freely accessible (self-)education through the creation and dissemination of OER and will in future publish learning materials and concepts as Open Educational Resources (OER) under a CC licence (cc-by and cc-by-sa).
Open Educational Resources (OER) are all types of teaching and learning materials that are provided in the public domain or under a free licence. The essence of these open materials is that anyone can copy, use, modify and distribute them legally and free of charge[1].
By providing OER, the C3L contributes to understanding digital educational media as an open and public resource in the context of educational processes, to using them for lifelong learning and to shaping them together.
OER can contribute to greater educational equality by overcoming the existing inequality of access to education. The C3L is aware of its institutional responsibility and the tension between economic efficiency and the public education mandate.
Networking, co-operation and quality enhancement are further potentials that are promoted by the possibility of (collaborative) further development of OER. These advantages not only enrich the C3L as an institution, but also benefit the C3L's teaching staff in particular.
The process described above is based on the OER strategy for advanced scientific training at the C3L, which sets out four central guiding principles. The concrete implementation and the design of the framework conditions for OER are ultimately orientated towards the fields of action defined in the OER strategy.
This endeavour to create, publish and share free educational resources and the accompanying discussions are also flanked by various ongoing and proposed OER projects at the university. These include the project "Open Educational Resources for Education and Science Management in the Context of Digitisation", which the C3L is carrying out together with Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences.
Further information can be found here: https: //uol.de/c3l/forschung/projekte
[1] German translation of the UNESCO definition, source: https://open-educational-resources.de/unesco-definition-zu-oer-deutsch/