Creating and hosting Open Educational Resources -- technical requirements and recommended platforms

Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are a core element of Open Science (OS) and play a prominent role in many OS policies drafted at Dutch higher education institutions in recent years. Moreover, national and European research infrastructure initiatives are also committed to the creation, linking and promotion of OERs. Within the European Digital Humanities research infrastructure Dariah, for instance, the #dariahTeach working group (https://www.dariah.eu/activities/working-groups/dariahteach/) has successfully hosted their own Moodle-based OER platform for years and is now migrating content to an updated Dariah CAMPUS environment, where digital humanities scholars can contribute new courses or link OERs hosted elsewhere. This effort is not unique to the humanities, however, as all academic disciplines are looking into new ways to make teaching materials widely accessible beyond the confines of traditional handbook publishing. A format that is especially popular in subject areas working with computational content is the Jupyter Book format, which allows teachers to combined instructional texts with code samples in an appealing layout. Codeberg Pages, which "allow you to easily publish static websites with a human-friendly address ( {username}.codeberg.page ) via Git on Codeberg" go in a similar direction. Based on my own experiences as co-chair of the #dariahTeach working group and as a scholar actively building an OER from the Jupyter Book based TeachBook (https://teachbooks.io/) template created by TU Delft, my workshop will provide participants with an overview of technologies and platforms currently used to create OERs in the academic community. We will also discuss workflows for migrating their own teaching materials from WORD docs or teaching platforms like CANVAS into more open formats. As part of this process, we will also discuss potential challenges like limited IT support at universities, copyright issues, licensing problems, or a lack of time and recognition for the effort of making educational materials open.