National Platform

Educational resources
Project

Innovation and implementation of digital educational resources

By 2023, students and lecturers will be using an optimised mix of (digital) educational resources – consisting of open, semi-open and commercial materials. This is the ambition of the Towards Digital (Open) Educational Resources zone. To achieve this ambition, the zone has launched a large-scale, two-year project to create the technical infrastructure for digital educational resources. It will focus on:

further development of a national platform for collaboration on digital educational resources;
a support desk with social network functionality;
implementation of the platform within educational institutions.

What exactly does the project entail? Read all about it on this page.

Further development of edusources

During the project, the Digital Educational Resources zone will continue to develop edusources on the basis of requirements of lecturers within professional communities and higher education institutions. This will make it possible to make open, semi-open, and commercial materials available on the platform. There will also be a dashboard with extra functionalities to allow lecturers to collaborate on various forms of digital educational resources. A yet to be established content advisory committee will advise on what content is valuable for various professional communities.

Support desk & accelerated adoption

These communities will decide for themselves what content they want to use. We are organising support for lecturers who want to get started with digital open educational resources. We are setting up a support desk: a knowledge centre offering support products such as step-by-step plans and workshops. We will also provide support on specific subjects. The support desk is also a place where people can meet, network and exchange knowledge.

In the first year, institutions participating in the zone and previous pilots will be invited to participate. From autumn 2021, the zone will organise an open call to give other higher education institutions the chance to take part in this project.

Collaboration

This project involves intensive collaboration with the Libraries Open and Online Education working group and SURF. The aim is to create a sustainable service for higher education in the Netherlands. We are taking an integrated approach by supporting institutions and communities centrally with the knowledge and resources available. We are also connecting experts and communities. The goal is to join forces and combine knowledge to make educational resources accessible from a single location.

Want to take part?

In order to develop and test all ideas, the Digital Educational Resources zone will gather input from a focus group and a content advisory committee. If you would like to contribute to the design of the national support desk, the development of the infrastructure or help determine the content strategy, please sign up using the button below.

More information

An update about the activities is provided in the article on the reuse of educational resources. More information can be found here:

During OE Week 2021, the webinar “Open… how to make it happen?” presented innovation and implementation plans of the Digital Educational Resources zone. Zone members Wouter Kleijheeg (EUR) and Sylvia Moes wrote an article about it. Furthermore, Lieke Rensink wrote a blog about the support desk.
In 2020, a needs assessment was carried out to find out what lecturers needed in terms of finding, sharing, editing and creating various types of content together within cross-institutional partnerships (communities). The project proposal for Innovation and Implementation of Digital Open Educational Resources is based in part on this study.
An inventory was made of 30,000 open textbooks, categorised according to subject area, language, and year of publication, and how lecturers can use them.