User:Cornelius Kibelka (WMDE)/Mapping OER/Header

What are Open Education Resources?[edit]

[Open educational resources are] teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work.
— Paris OER Declaration (UNESCO, 2012)

Education has a considerable influence on social participation and access to knowledge. For this reason, we are involved at the political level as advocates of free education and play an active role in policymaking.

Education faces the challenge of empowering learners to actively participate in the learning process. Open educational resources are a logical solution to this challenge, given that the process involved in creating and using OER is collaborative and thus offers both learners and teachers individualized and up-to-date educational material that they can use, edit and prepare digitally to suit their needs and interests. In this way, OER can make an important contribution to supporting and enabling individual learners and teachers to exploit the potential of digitization and assume an active role.

Shaping OER in Germany[edit]

Our mission is to make all the knowledge in the world freely available to everyone. For us, improving access to education is one of the most important ways to accomplish this mission. When it comes to the debate on OER, Wikipedia comes up time and again as an exemplary model and a testament to the concepts of digital learning, collaborative work, and participatory education.

As we understand it, educational activities cannot and must not stop at Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. These should serve instead as a starting point. The goal must be to instill the principle of openness in society. In order to achieve this, our educational activities bring together the Wikimedia communities with political actors and partner institutions in a participatory process, such as the Mapping OER project.