What is OER?
OER stands for Open Educational Resources. In short, this means learning materials that are available to everyone free of charge.
There are learning materials in all conceivable subject areas and levels that are provided with open licenses: the so-called Creative Commons or CC licenses. This means that the materials can be used, shared, edited, mixed, stored and reproduced.
Why use OER and where can you find them?
Or: Why do twice the work when someone else has already created materials on the same topic and made them publicly and freely available. If it doesn't exactly match your own ideas and concept, you can change the material or only use parts of it. In any case, this saves you a lot of work. Countless OER materials can be found on websites such as COMET MetEd, MERLOT or OERworldmap.
Why should you create OER?
If you are a teacher, you have already created a lot of teaching material, which is often already OER. You just didn't know it yet. Making this available and helping others with it is a great enrichment, just as you can benefit from the materials of others. Everyone contributes a little until all the gaps are closed and we only have to put together our lessons from pure OERs. But how do you do that, you ask yourself?
How to create OER?
The easiest way is to take your existing material and check it for OER. Then add the appropriate license and put it online (sadly only in german). That's it.
Another option is to package the materials, if they are not already digitized, in videos, animations or H5P elements to make them clearer and more fun to learn.