Group Admins
Description
Session Description
When addressing digitalization in general, or specifically OERs, Germany is a country one might call periphery. In our presentation we will not ask why a country that is generally considered one of the most developed countries in the world (Fichtner et al., 2018: 105) is in arrears of other countries when talking about digitalization (Carrel, 2018). We will much rather deal with the effects this has for practicing OERs at a university and in how far our project is representative for Germany and/or digital peripheries. We ask the question: How does one go back to basics if those basics have not even been established yet?
The reflective practice presentation gives us the perfect means to do just that. At our university we have developed a repository for open resources. Originally intended as a pure OER platform we quickly encountered problems that needed addressing: We were asked: Why would one want to open university teaching at all? For whom was the repository created? In whose interest exactly are we doing this? All these questions come up in the first main theme for OER19 and they are the reason why we want to present our practice, reflecting and specifying the challenges we have faced.
For the largest part, the basics are where we still stand with our project. We want to give the audience an insight into the creation of a repository for open resources in Germany – digital periphery – and reflect on its development as well as challenges we have faced. We will shed light on the beginnings of the project, from the conceptual stages and planning to the first publicly available version. From there on out we can look at the evolution of the project and why it was an evolution in the first place and not the revolution we might have hoped for (Muuß-Merholz, 2018: 176).
The repository will turn 3 in 2019. In these three years it has changed substantially. Looking back, we found that we are still at the beginning of our journey, still at the basics. Thus, we ask another question from the first theme: ‘In what ways has the open agenda been appropriated, and what are the implications of this?’ Furthermore, this raises the question: Do three years of actively promoting an open repository have an impact on the appropriation of the open agenda at our university? Or was it in fact the other way round? Lastly, having looked at the past and the present, we look into the future: Is our platform sustainable? ‘What are the paths to sustainability?’
With all these topics reviewed and discussed we want to abstract from our small scale practice to how our challenges may affect other universities in other countries, thus answering the questions from the very beginning: Is the project representative? What are the basics we want to go back to? Where can we go from here? With these questions we would like to go into a Q+A and give our audience the chance to comment or ask questions.
Session content
I. Introduction
II. Motivation
III. Back to Basics? Starting with the Basics!
IV. Critical Review of the Project’s Development
V. Effect on Other Universities in Other Countries
VI. Answers to the Introductory Questions (?)
VII. Q+A
References
Carrel, P. (2018, June 25). Rebooting Germany: Where Europe’s strongest economy is falling behind. Retrieved December 20, 2018, from https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/germany-digital-gap/
Fichtner, F., Brenke, K., Breuer, C., Clemens, M., Junker, S., Michelsen, C., & Schlaak, T. (2018). New government’s policies give the thriving German economy an additional boost. DIW Weekly Report, 8(10 11), 102-111. Retrieved December 20, 2018, from http://hdl.handle.net/10419/176796
Muuß-Merholz, J. (2018). Freie Unterrichtsmaterialien finden, rechtssicher einsetzen, selbst machen und teilen. Retrieved December 20, 2018, from https://www.beltz.de/fileadmin/beltz/kostenlose-downloads/9783407630612.docx
Participants
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angelica
joined 5 years, 8 months ago -
julielindsay
joined 5 years, 8 months ago -
paola corti
joined 5 years, 8 months ago -
michael_fuchs
joined 5 years, 8 months ago -
scott connor
joined 5 years, 8 months ago -
Leo Havemann
joined 5 years, 8 months ago -
Martin Dougiamas
joined 5 years, 9 months ago -
ALT
joined 5 years, 9 months ago
