OE Global 2019

The Siemens Stiftung Media Portal for STEM teaching has consisted entirely of OER since April 2018. Some 4,000 media on health, energy, and the environment, available in English, German, and Spanish, are designed to support teachers in all school types and grade levels. More than 53,000 users from 120 countries utilize our OER and methodology guides or our student-only area.
The Media Portal celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2019. The objectives in converting it to an OER portal was to lower the barriers to access, boost the distribution of digital media, promote the use of OER through teaching methods and real-world content, and raise awareness on how to use OER.
The run-up to the changeover required a review of our Articles of Association and the law governing foundations. In addition, we checked all the media: whether they could be adapted as OER and whether necessary resources were available. Mostly we could renegotiate user rights with the authors, since we had carefully documented the copyright information from the outset. Today, detailed rules ensure that all legal requirements are met when creating new media. Together with educational experts, we ensure the content is neutral, complete and has the necessary pedagogical-didactic depth. Each medium is assigned file attributes, metadata, and user rights.
• We want more people to create OER legally compliant and share them with us. The lack of knowledge about copyright law and license models is a major obstacle for OER.
• The OER must reach the people who need them: Indexing correctly makes it possible for media to be found, and as many portals as possible should be linked.
• Particularly in developing nations, OER alone are not enough. We must also support the creativity and resourcefulness of teachers who cannot teach digitally due to a lack of infrastructure.