OE Global 2019

On 1 January 2019, an ambitious program took off to boost innovation of Higher Education in the Netherlands using ICT. The shared ambitions of this program are: better connection to the job market, making education more flexible and learning smarter and better by using technology. The program is divided into 7 areas (zones. In each zone, institutions of HE cooperate to realize these ambitions.

One of the zones is called “Towards digital (open) educational resources”. In this zone, 7 universities and 2 UoAS collaborate to realize the ambition that in 2023, HE institutions in the Netherlands are able to offer teachers and learners the opportunity to determine and use an optimal mix of learning resources. To accomplish this, a.o. improving the technical and organisational infrastructure and enhancing an open infrastructure seamless and transparent with a more closed one is needed. Stimulating the use of open resources is part of the ambition, but open is not considered a dogma in the optimal mix. This is an important difference compared to other programs aiming at stimulating sharing and reuse of OER, treating openness in isolation with non-open resources. We believe that this difference, together with taking the educational vision of the teacher as starting point will widen adoption of open sharing and reuse.

For 2019, the main activity of this zone is to conduct research into the ways students and teachers determine their optimal mix of learning resources and the underlying principles. The results will be the basis for the zone activities in the remaining time of the program. Other activities in 2019 comprise improvements to the available national technical infrastructure and creating awareness among teachers about the opportunities of open pedagogy and open educational practices. In the presentation we will report about the activities and the results of the research.