Open Educational Resources

OER (Open Educational Resources) are teaching and learning materials that are made available under open licenses, usually free of charge. The university has adopted an OER policy in 2024. This policy encourages instructors to publish or share their own materials under open licenses in accordance with copyright law.

The OER Policy of the University of Bremen was adopted by the University of Bremen Executive Board on October 15, 2024 and was acknowledged and approved by the Academic Senate on November 13, 2024. This move sends a strong signal in favor of open, free educational resources and a society where education and knowledge are freely available. The OER policy will encourage university teachers and staff to publish their materials as OER.

The text of the University of Bremen's OER policy is available on this website and can be downloaded as PDF document.

As part of their teaching activities, teaching staff at the University of Bremen produce valuable, creative, and innovative materials for their classes, practical sessions, and examinations. Many of these educational materials, whether they are texts, images, videos, audio recordings, or other materials, are suitable for further use by other teachers and students. Such materials can be published under open licenses. They are then referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER).

OER have the following advantages over materials that are not freely licensed:

they are available free of charge
they can be further developed, improved, and brought up to date by the creators or by other colleagues
they promote exchange and networking among teachers
they save time – digital materials that are complex to create do not have to be redeveloped
the contributions of the University of Bremen and the individual lecturers are clearly attributed and visible to the outside world

The OER policy is a building block of the following strategies and objectives:

shaping digitalization in line with the Bremen State Science Plan 2025
the "Shaping digitalization" goal of the university's 2018-2028 strategy
the implementation of the UNESCO recommendation on OER from 2019
the achievement of the development goal "Quality Education" (SDG 4) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

The University of Bremen recommends the use and creation of open educational resources (OER) in all suitable areas of study and teaching. It welcomes it when teaching staff and other employees:

make educational materials created by them, which are suitable for further use as OER, available for teaching and learning in compliance with copyright law,
use openly available teaching and learning materials in their teaching,
when possible, use other free content such as open access publications or open source software in teaching.

Educators who would like to publish materials as OER can obtain advice and support from the Center for Multimedia in Teaching (ZMML), the Bremen State and University Library (SuUB), and the Higher Education Didactics Office (Administrative Unit 13 – Teaching and Studies). Further information and contact details can be found on the Open Educational Resources website.

As with scientific publications, the authors of the materials are responsible for the quality assurance of the media published as OER. This includes compliance with license and copyright regulations, technical standards, and accessibility. They are also responsible for the quality of the content and didactic concepts, compliance with academic standards, and the alignment with University of Bremen's Mission Statement. If the teaching materials contain original research results or research data, it must be clarified whether this conflicts with publication as OER.

Licensing

The University of Bremen recommends using the Creative Commons CC licenses for licensing and publishing open educational media under the current version of one of the following Creative Commons license types. The licenses recommended here are considered open licenses and represent the lowest barriers for the reuse of materials. It is advisable to use the corresponding icon of the Creative Commons license.

CC 0 1.0 Universal (Public Domain Dedication):
Copyright is waived to the extent possible under national legislation. Link to the license text:
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.de

CC BY:
Educational media can be used with attribution to the author's name. Link to the license text in version CC BY 4.0 International:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.de

CC BY-SA:
The name of the author must be credited, and the same license must be used for reuse (share alike). Link to the license text in version CC BY-SA 4.0 International:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.de

Use of the OER Twillo Portal for Publication

The University of Bremen recommends publishing OER in the "Twillo" portal – the Lower Saxony “Portal for OER in Higher Education.” Employees of the University of Bremen have access through DFN for single sign-on to upload their materials, add the metadata and descriptions, and publish them.

Naming of the University of Bremen in Metadata

Analogous to scientific publications, the institutional affiliation (University of Bremen) should also be noted in the metadata of the OER repository (Twillo) for educational materials created in connection with the University of Bremen.

Use of Open Formats

To enable the reusability of open educational materials, they should be published in open digital formats (e.g., txt, odt). When creating such materials, open-source software should be prioritized. Formats that depend on proprietary software for editing should be avoided as much as possible.