Abstract:

Over the past ten years, a dynamic increase in the number of OER (open educational resources) publishing sites can be observed in the German-speaking world.

During this period a lot of time and – if not money, then at least thought - has gone into developing software for such platforms, setting them up and running them, and providing a useful, well defined and interoperable description of the OER hosted there.

Ideally, the feedback from end-users of OER on this development would be that it has become easy and fruitful to search for OER for one's own teaching, that clearly specified, well-understood licensing makes it easy to reuse the discovered OER. OER creators would state that it is perceived as rewarding to create OER and that the platforms to publish OER are well maintained and user-friendly. Providers of OER platforms and metadata aggregators would have a good understanding about their collaboration and would make the OER as well as the relevant metadata available in a user-oriented, accessible and sustainable way.
However, these goals do not seem to have been achieved yet (at least not in the german-speaking world.)

In this paper we describe challenges met by the different roles in the OER ecosystem - from producers, aggregators to re-users. We look at how a local OER Repository can attempt to alleviate some of the problems raised in this world of imperfect data, badly defined metadata and broken APIs (Application Programming Interface).

We demonstrate a solution that attempts to address these needs and issues of different user groups using the case study of an Austrian university. We are aware, however, that this specific setting at an Austrian HEI (higher educational institute) therefore might not be applicable in every other educational contexts and other institutional setting. We therefore try to formulate more general needs that may be addressed quite differently in different contexts.

Keywords:

OER, quality assurance, HEI, pedagogical benefit, repositories, innovative infrastructures, open education.