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Open Educational Resources (OER) toolkit

Types of OERs

OERs can include individual resources or full courses or collections. This includes (but is not limited to) resources developed by individuals, such as:

  • text (e.g., academic text, handouts, teaching notes, blog posts, data sets, open textbooks, open access publications, assignments, marking rubrics)
  • images (e.g., photos, diagrams, infographics)
  • audio (e.g., music, podcasts)
  • databases and open data
  • multimedia materials (e.g., videos, animations)

OERs can also include larger courses or collections published by institutions:

  • course units or whole courses (e.g., openly-licensed courses such as MOOCs or OpenCourseWare (OCW))
  • collections (e.g., those from libraries, archives, or museums) such as those seen below

Examples of OERs

Examples of OERs produced for Una Europa or examples from universities across the Una Europa Alliance are included below and throughout this page.

  • Coronavirus diagram from the University of Helsinki

    Koronavirusvariantit, rokotteet ja immuunijärjestelmä, Mikael Niku, Helsingin Yliopisto, 2021, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

  • Guide to Inferential Statistics in Geosciences

    Guide to Inferential Statistics in Geosciences, Kay Douglas & Sophie Flack, University of Edinburgh, 2019, CC BY

  • Worksheet in German from Genom Edit Ethic, Freie Universität Berlin

    Genom Edit Ethic Worksheet from Freie Universität Berlin, Tom Wellmann, CC BY-SA 4.0

The examples shown above include:

  • A creative cartoon diagram engaging individuals on the topic of Coronavirus, shared with the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence by a member of the University of Helsinki
  • A collaboratively-developed resource for high school pupils on inferential statistics in geosciences developed for a student assignment on the Geosciences Outreach Course at the University of Edinburgh, shared with the CC BY licence to allow teachers to adapt the resource for their pupils
  • A worksheet on genome ethics along with questions that ask to what extent are people allowed to intervene in nature for their own purposes, shared with the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence by a member of the Genom Edit Ethik team at Freie Universität Berlin to engage and benefit the general public

Una Europa’s various initiatives and Joint Innovative Formats (JIFs) in education and mobility are also developing OERs, including the following:

The cultural heritage items shared by our libraries' special collections teams, as seen below, are also often shared in the public domain and can be considered OERs.

  • Historical image from the KU Leuven Libraries Special Collections

    Grégoire Janssens. Kandidaet-Notaris. Eigenaer-Uitgever van den Zondagbode GYa00127, KU Leuven Libraries Special Collections, Public Domain

  • Historical document from Jagiellonian University Library

    Historia scholastica NDIGORP013253, Petrus Comestor, Jagiellonian University, Public Domain

  • Historical document from the University of Edinburgh collections

    Hortus sanitatis Fol.320 recto, Incunabula Collection ID: 0179512, University of Edinburgh, CC BY

Other examples of OERs are outputs from collaborative projects with contributions from our Una Europa partner universities, including:

Public, institutional, and national OER collections

OERs have been foundational to the development of this toolkit, drawing on the openly licenced work of others. Numerous OERs are shared via public repositories including: Openverse (with over 600 million items to reuse), Wikimedia Commons (e.g., images, videos, audio, text, books, data), Google advanced search when filtering by license usage rights (e.g., images, videos, audio, text, books), Slideshare (e.g., presentations, diagrams, infographics), Github (e.g., software and other materials).

Institutional and national OER collections to which our Una Europa universities contribute include:

  • Some of the extensive variety of MOOCs from our institutions can be considered OERs, as long as they clearly show that the content includes Creative Commons licenses
  • The University of Edinburgh's Open.Ed showcase of OERs includes activities, resource lists, 3D models, openly-licensed workbooks, unique resources from the University’s library and archival collections, resources for primary and secondary schools, and more. Furthermore, the Creative Commons channel on the University's MediaHopper video repository includes over 5,000 videos that are considered to be OERs
  • Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne's video recordings of talks hosted on their Mediatheque media library, some of which include open licences including many videos within the Una Europa channel
  • KU Leuven Libraries' open collections including Digital Heritage Online and Modern Digitised Materials
  • Jagiellonian University's Digital Library, including many items in the public domain
  • National Finnish OER repositories (to which the University of Helsinki actively contributes) such as the AOE Library of Open Educational Resources and the Finna.fi cultural heritage repository

Except where otherwise noted or where logos are trademarked, this content was developed by the Una Europa OER Working Group, 2022, CC BY.

The European Commission support for the production of Una Europa content does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors. The European Commission is not liable for any consequences stemming from the reuse of any and all publications of  Una Europa.