Making your learning materials open is easier than you think. Creating open educational resources (or OER) is similar to authoring any other document (a Word document, a PDF or a video), except that you are assigning an open license to that content and making the content as widely available as possible.

Sharing your OER

But once created, how will you share your OER? There are sites available on which you can directly upload and share your materials, and there are educational repositories designed specifically to assist with the creation and hosting of OER. Consider submitting your work to MERLOT, OER Commons or the Open Textbook Library. Or … try the edusources platform.

Edusources platform

The Dutch edusources platform facilitates the easy exchange of resources for subject teachers and contains a varied range of collections of (open) educational resources. You can find materials easily and quickly. Initially by using the search bar, but if you already have a better idea of what you are looking for, you can immediately filter by level of education, language or type of learning material. On the Communities page, you can also easily search for collections of educational resources that are put together by specific communities.

The edusources platform is the result of several pioneer initiatives (like Wikiwijs and HBO Kennisbank) and is currently being upgraded in a national incentive scheme. Next to storage, attention is being paid to connect to other existing platforms and searching both within and beyond the platform. Maastricht University is one of the participating institutes.

Start sharing via edusources

If you want to start sharing your material via the edusources platform, you can start right away. The resources can be shared entirely openly or only within the institution or professional community. You are required to login on the backend of edusources (or actually the Sharekit) via SURF conext.

Note: you can upload material, but publishing is done by the library (send your request to the repository manager).

Need help? Please contact us for an intake!

Author: UM edusources project team 

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.