Abstract:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are an important element in the process of digitizing higher education teaching and are seen as an essential building block for openness in the education system. OER can potentially play an important role in improving the education around the globe, since it eases the access to high quality digital educational materials. However, there are challenges that are facing the deployment of OER in Higher Education. One of the most important challenges is the production of new OER materials and the conversion of already existing educational resources to OER. This could be viable by qualifying educators and teachers through training courses and/or supporting them with an appropriate tool. There are many tools to create new OER contents. However, there is a huge amount of already produced and well-tested educational materials, which could be utilized and converted to OER instead of producing new content from the scratch. In this paper, we will summarize different aspects of deploying OER in the context of higher education based on a survey conducted during OER workshops. The survey output will be introduced briefly concentrating mainly on challenges facing the educators when dealing with OER. We suggest some ideas and solutions to overcome these challenges in order to ease the deployment of OER. Additionally, we will introduce a tool currently under development to support converting the educational materials to OER and we will present its main functionality.

Keywords:

OER, higher education, Open, Education, Open Educational Resources, OER Survey, OER Tool.