welcome

Open Educational Resources (OER for short) are learning and teaching materials that are freely accessible and usable. Thanks to open licensing, they can be used free of charge, but can also be adapted and republished.

Numerous Austrian and international universities promote the
Development of OER, capacity building and dissemination.

Austrian universities make their OER activities visible with the certificate "Certified OER Higher Education Institution". Employees can proved their OER competences with the certificate "OER pracitioner | OER-Praktiker:in".

The Austrian OER certification is based on a white paper by fnma (2016) and will be developed and introduced as part of the "Open Education Austria Advanced" project (2020-2024).

OER certificates
make OER activities and competencies visible

Certified OER Higher Education Institution

The certificate "Certified OER Higher Education Institution" is the world's first certificate on OER for educational institutions. It marks Austrian universities with a strategic commitment to Open Educational Resources (OER) and support their activities.

Accredited OER training

Accredited further training concepts guarantee participants and universities the transfer of OER know-how.

OER Practitioner

Since 2022, employees of Austrian universities have received this certificate to prove their OER skills when participating in accredited further OER training.

Further readings

Already in 2016 the idea of an OER certification was formulated by the fnma working group on OER. :

• OER-Certification in Higher Education [Link zum Download]

We described the development and implementation of the Austrian OER certfication we as well in the following papers:

• Schön, S., Ebner, M., Berger, E., Brandhofer, G., Gröblinger, O., Jadin, T., Kopp, M., Steinbacher, H-P., & Zwiauer, C. (2021). OER Certification of Individuals and Organisations in Higher Education: Implementations Worldwide. Open Praxis, 13(3), pp. 264–278. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.13.3.265
• Schön, S., Ebner, M., Berger, E., Brandhofer, G., Edelsbrunner, S., Gröblinger, O., Hackl., C., Jadin, T., Kopp, M., Neuböck, K., Proinger, J., Schmölz, A., & Steinbacher, H-P. (2023). Development of an Austrian OER Certification for Higher Education Institutions and Their Employees. In: Otto, D., Scharnberg, G., Kerres, M., Zawacki-Richter, O. (eds) Distributed Learning Ecosystems . Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38703-7_9

Contact

Please contact Sandra Schön (sandra.schoen@fnma.at) for more information about the Austrian OER certification for higher education institutions. Thanks!