Category: Open Source

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Toolboxes – an overview of overviews

There are now so many digital tools, apps, programs and platforms for digital teaching and learning that it can be difficult to choose. Annotated overviews, websites and toolboxes are intended to make this selection easier and to make applications easier to find. We have tried out and compared some of them.


1. Find my Tool

FindMyTool originated as a collaborative tool on Github and includes over 800 tools as of today. The filterable collection in the form of tiles is available in German, is constantly being expanded and updated, and allows suggestions. The use is free and possible without registration.

  1. Digitale Tools – eine Übersicht

The bildung.digital list is aimed specifically at schools and teachers and is organized by application area. Only tools recommended by the editorial team are presented. The list is free of charge and available in German without registration.

3. Portal:Tools

Portal:Tools is designed by Martin Luther University Halle for university teaching as a filterable table and presents a large selection of corresponding tools in German. There is the possibility to suggest tools and the use is free of charge without registration.

4. Tool-Sammlung

The digital tool collection from Hochschulforum Digitalisierung is the result of a community survey. The list includes a selection of tools for online events and is organized by application area. The list is free and available in German without registration.

  1. alternativeTo.net

On the crowd-sourced website AlternativeTo.net, users can search specifically for alternatives to a particular tool. The website displays descriptions and user comments about each tool and lets you filter the provided overview of alternatives by platform, features and license. It is available free of charge and without registration in English.

These examples differ, among other things, in their structure and focus such as specific topics or teaching/learning contexts. We are happy about all solutions that help to make tools findable and to decide consciously and criterion-guided for or against certain tools.

Like quite a few other OER projects, some overviews are funded by third party funding or limited by a funding line, so hosting may not be taken over in the long term (think of the wonderful OER Worldmap, which is unfortunately no longer available). With the idea of being able to optimize and administer an overview in the long term, the OESA Toolbox was created in May 2020 during the hackathon “Wir hacken das digitale Sommersemester” (We hack the digital summer semester) by the Hochschulforum Digitalisierung (Higher Education Forum Digitization) as a volunteer-organized and independent project. It is intended as a filterable overview that can be used to search specifically for tools, categories, settings and functions. If a tool is missing from the overview, a new line can be added without registration and tracking, and we add any fields that may have been left empty. We host the toolbox in Germany and have provided a manual with ideas for didactic use under an open license (CC-BY-SA).

Looking to the future, we want to help optimize existing offerings and make interfaces available. For example, we are curious to see how the national education platform can advise teachers and learners in the search for and selection of suitable applications.

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Open Source in agriculture?!

When most people think of “open source”, they don’t initially think of agriculture, gardening or food cultivation. In fact, it is precisely in this area that there are promising ideas and lively developments.

This is possibly due to the ever-growing population and the climate crisis, which will increase the potential for food insecurity in the future. One possible solution to these problems and sustainable food production may be precision agriculture. It is characterized by the use of digital technologies to monitor and optimize agricultural production practices and provides a mechanism to improve food security and create sustainable food patterns. Various sensors are used for this purpose, such as those that measure the water storage capacity of the soil or the temperature. If, for example, an irregular water storage capacity of the soil is detected by the devices, the water supply to the plants can be adjusted to their needs. Your own garden or farm thus becomes a research station. The easiest way to implement this concept is with the help of open source technologies and applications to grow food where it was not possible before and have a food source at any time of the year. In open gardening and open farming, food computers in particular are widely used. These are basically tabletop gardens controlled by a computer through a network of sensors, lights and fans, and were first developed by students at Green Street Academy. It is a foam box that contains everything a plant needs to grow and thrive: Water, food, light and a controlled climate. But Open Gardening and Open Farming are not just about the technologies used, but also the corresponding open mindset. All of these developments were and are only possible through collaboration. In the foreground of the Open Farming community is the exchange of knowledge and ideas in order to jointly and mutually realize and further develop the various projects. In the following, we present four such open projects that are working together to address the problem of the climate crisis:

With FarmBot, anyone can use CNC machines that use control technology to automatically produce workpieces and the associated web app on any computer or mobile device to grow various plants and vegetables and manage their own garden from anywhere. The control system is operated manually and no programming skills are required. The open-source technology can grow a person’s entire vegetable needs continuously, and after two years, at a lower cost than buying from the average U.S. grocery store.

OpenFarm is a free and open database of agricultural and horticultural knowledge. The idea was to create, with the help of experts and beginners in agriculture, a centralized, structured and open dataset describing how to grow plants under specific environmental conditions and with specific cultivation practices. This created a community and tools for freely sharing crop knowledge locally and globally, with the goal of breaking down boundaries through the open exchange of knowledge and increasing participation in the food system. All data and content of OpenFarm is in the public domain (CC0) and thus easily accessible. The source code of OpenFarm is available on GitHub under MIT license.

farmOS is a web-based application for farm management, planning and recording. It is being developed by a community of farmers, developers, researchers, and organizations with the goal of providing a standard platform for collecting and managing agricultural data. The farmOS server is based on Drupal, which makes it modular, extensible and secure, and, like the accompanying app, is licensed under the GNU General Public License, meaning they are free and open source.

TANIA is an open source farm management or administration software for farmers initiated with the help of developers, users, farmers, researchers and agriculture experts from Tanibox in 2017 and hosted on GitHub. It was developed primarily for farmers and developers interested in precision agriculture. The software works on any farm, is easily accessible, flexible, secure, user-friendly and affordable. It also provides connectivity with devices such as sensors and actuators to give farmers more control over monitoring and controlling their farm, wherever they are and whenever they need it. This allows them to make their operations more sustainable.

Sources:

https://www.thuenen.de/de/at/arbeitsbereiche/umwelttechnologie-boden-pflanze/praezisionslandwirtschaft/

https://www.redhat.com/de/open-source-stories/farming-for-the-future

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Surveys, polls and quizzes in (digital) educational settings: alternatives to Doodle

Surveys and didactics

Digital teaching via Zoom or similar can quickly become passive and monotonous. In order to avoid the transfer of frontal teaching into the digital format and to reduce the inhibition threshold for participation in digital teaching, survey tools can be integrated as didactic means in the common video conferencing tools. These can be used flexibly and are a simple means of activating learners. Classically, surveys are used in teaching for knowledge or opinion polling. Thus, with the help of online or live surveys, knowledge can be checked or opinions can be obtained in real time in the classroom. This form of interactivation is particularly suitable offline and online for involving the large group or the plenum. The process is simple: surveys can be created and enabled in advance or live in the session, and respondents answer by clicking a link or QR code via smartphone or computer. In the process, the video conference management can decide whether voting should be anonymous or whether the names of the participants should be visible to everyone or only to themselves. The results of the poll are output in real time. In addition, polling tools can be used in class or course scheduling or to help assign topics for assignments, presentations or papers. Real-time questioning via a Twitter wall also provides a nice change of pace. Formats such as Tweedback digitally collect questions that lecturers can respond to later. Keyword collections and ideas can be designed as digital card queries with tools such as Oncoo – this works very similarly to the analog collection of topics on moderation cards. When integrating survey tools, many instructors turn to Doodle.

Criticism of Doodle

Doodle seems to be a simple solution: Commonly known and easy to use. However, the platform is problematic in terms of data protection, because Doodle is based outside the EU. In the free Doodle account, surveys are not SSL-encrypted, i.e. personal data is transmitted transparently and not protected from external access. In addition, Doodle allows advertisements from Google (AdSense) in its surveys. So at the latest when it comes to use in a school context and the online safety of children and young people, it becomes critical. Therefore, in the following we present safe alternatives that are free and partly open. Note: Free and open are not necessarily the same thing.

  1. Pingo

The open source application Pingo was developed by the University of Paderborn and made available free of charge. Hosted in Germany, the tool can be used to create simple surveys to query the state of knowledge or gather feedback. Since it is a university project, the operators themselves also offer didactic advice here on how to best integrate the tool into teaching.

  1. LamaPoll

The survey tool LamaPoll can be used to create simple polls and polls as well as scheduling and scientific questionnaires. The service is DSGVO compliant and does not collect IP addresses or other personal data.

  1. Nuudel

The non-tracking survey tool Nuudel is offered free of charge by the non-profit association Digitalcourage e.V. and can be used primarily for opinion polls and voting. Nuudel is based on the free software Framadate and runs on the association’s hardware. Server and software are protected from external access and no IP addresses are stored, only the answers in the polls. Registration is not required and instead of an email address, anything can be typed in.

  1. Tweedback

The survey tool Tweedback can also be used anonymously, since users do not have to register with an e-mail address and no IP addresses are permanently stored. Instead, only the most necessary data is stored on servers located in Germany. In the basic version, Tweedback offers the functions chatwall, quiz and panic button.

We have explained these functions in more detail in a tutorial on YouTube. In it, we introduce you to the survey tools Tweedback, Pingo and Kahoot! and compare them based on their scope of use, GDPR compliance and possible uses.

You’d rather get an overview yourself? In our toolbox you can compare the survey tools mentioned and many more and filter them by different features.

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Criteria for good OER

In our last article, we presented various funding models for open textbooks and showed how easy it can be to integrate Open Educational Resources (OER) into everyday school practices. However, with regard to textbooks, there is still skepticism on the part of teachers: Compared to proofread textbooks, there is sometimes a fear of loss of quality, because there is no higher authority (such as usually the publishing industry) that checks the OER materials with expertise. Although it should be noted here that for the most part, publisher review is only concerned with whether textbooks are curriculum compliant. In the case of open educational materials, publishing staff are replaced by members of online communities who share their professional and instructional knowledge to evaluate existing materials and identify specific materials for closer scrutiny. The quality of OER materials is derived from the basic ideas of open thinking and can be assessed using the following OER-specific quality criteria:

  1. Low-threshold

OER should be easy to access and understand. In terms of content, the materials are designed to be low-threshold through simple language and formats that appeal to multiple senses (e.g., video with subtitles). The temporal and spatial low-threshold nature of the OER materials is ensured by the decentralized nature of the Internet. The materials can be accessed at any time from any location, provided an Internet connection is available.

2. Accessibility

But making educational materials and offerings available online is only the first step. Access to educational materials is still often restricted or at least made more difficult by paid offerings and the condition of registration. The same applies to the provision of materials in exclusively proprietary and closed file formats (e.g., a worksheet only as a PDF). Access to OER should therefore be non-binding and unconditional, and ideally also free of charge, in order to reach everyone. More specifically, there must be different access points to the learning content as well as different teaching formats.

3. Customizability

If teachers have now found open teaching materials online, they are still faced with the problem that these are often not one hundred percent suitable for their purposes and must be adapted either in terms of layout, content or file format. Depending on the license form, however, the freedom of usability is quite limited (e.g. CC BY-ND, i.e. attribution and no editing as a default). Other Creative Commons license forms (e.g., CC ZERO) allow adaptation, remixing, and use of parts of other open materials to create new OER. The ideal forms of licensing for OER are therefore CC ZERO, CC BY, and CC BY-NC, as they are the most open and thus offer the greatest creative freedom.

4. Safety

In order to be able to use the OER in a legally secure way, they should be visibly and correctly labeled with a license (e.g. a CC license). This is because missing information means that they cannot or may not be used. If, on the other hand, sources are carefully indicated and changes to the source material are documented in such a way that they can be viewed by all users, long-term use and further development is made possible. If the rights of use are clearly and completely stated, OER materials can be used without hesitation.

In short, OER should be easily accessible and easy to use in a legally compliant manner, as well as flexible and adaptable, saving time and money and promoting educational equity.

This topic has already been discussed many times – here we have compiled more in-depth information:

Sources:

1 https://wb-web.de/material/medien/qualitat-von-offenen-bildungsmaterialien-einschatzen.html

2 https://www.bpb.de/mediathek/video/234998/oer-erklaert-ueber-die-qualitaet-der-materialien/

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Financing models for open textbooks

In 2017, Maximilian Heimstädt and Leonhard Dobusch presented their study “Perspectives of Open Educational Resources (OER) for (socio-) economic education at schools in NRW and in Germany“, formulating various models for funding OER textbooks. The study, which addresses educational policy in North Rhine-Westphalia, presents the current state of school education in NRW in 2017 as well as the challenges of digitization processes and develops solution proposals from the perspective of Open Educational Resources (OER). The central proposal of the study, in order to avoid untested, tendentious online materials in teaching, is the systematic promotion of the creation of official OER textbooks, which can be distributed, modified and recombined in a legally secure manner and have passed the quality test of the state of NRW. For this purpose, the authors design different scenarios for the (financial) promotion of textbooks under free license:

  1. Call for proposals for pilot textbooks

Significantly more OER textbooks are pre-funded through public calls for tender. The concept has low implementation hurdles and ties in directly with successful OER projects. In Norway, for example, approximately 20 percent of the textbook budget – or 8.2 million Euros – has been invested in the development of OER materials since 2006. Following this example, the OER stock and corresponding competencies at publishing houses could be successively increased.

  1. Usage-based refinancing of OER textbooks.

In this scenario, the public funding of OER textbooks is usage-based through the remuneration of OER textbooks that have successfully passed textbook approval and are actually used in school settings. The amount of compensation is determined on the basis of surveys and sample surveys of OER textbooks in the classroom.

  1. Development of OER textbook ‘blanks’.

Instead of investing in ready-made OER textbooks, funding could also be provided for the creation of ‘blanks’ that can easily be adapted to the requirements in different federal states. What the blanks have in common are only minimum content requirements from the Ministry of Education, which are controlled for quality assurance. From then on, they can be individually supplemented by educational media providers with additional multimedia offerings, without them having to worry about open licensing of the basic content.

  1. Introduction of an OER clause in the approval process.

In this scenario, providers would have to contractually commit through an OER clause in the textbook approval process by the state of NRW to make the textbooks available as OER after a defined phase of commercial distribution. The phase could be defined either temporally (e.g., after five years) or factually (e.g., when a certain number have been sold). Thus, after a short period of time, there could be OER textbooks for a wide variety of subjects in NRW.

The various financing models can be read in more detail here with recommendations from the authors.

What has happened since then and what’s next?

In 2020, the Ministry of Culture and Science, together with the Digital University NRW (DH.NRW), funded 18 concepts for digital teaching and learning formats with a total of 10.5 million euros in the “OERContent.nrw” (Open Education Resources) funding line as a result of the Corona pandemic, in order to expand the e-learning offerings of universities. The teaching and learning content was posted on the new online state portal ORCA.nrw (Open Resources Campus NRW) and is available to all students and teachers in NRW.

OERContent.nrw is the largest nationwide funding line for open educational resources. The funding line is intended to make the benefits of freely accessible teaching and learning offerings recognizable and tangible for teachers and students. But more offerings and funding initiatives are needed. The task of education policy is to adapt existing funding models to enable the professional creation of OER textbooks and learning materials.

Quellen:

http://www.fgw-nrw.de/fileadmin/user_upload/NOED-Studie-06-Dobusch-A1-komplett-Web.pdf

https://www.dh.nrw/kooperationen/OER-Content.nrw-42

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From Open Access to Open Source: definitions of openness in diverse fields

Openness is a movement and a guiding principle that originated in the software field and has since found its way into a variety of other topics and fields of activity. In this article we present selected topics and the significance of openness in them. 

Open Source

Open source is a movement, a way of thinking, and a way of working. Beginning in open source software (OSS), it now goes far beyond this frame of reference to find new ways to solve problems in communities and industries. Open source is also often used synonymously with open source software and open source hardware.

Open Source Software

The term open source originally goes back to open source software (OSS). OSS describes code that is accessible to the public and can be modified and shared, i.e. the software is published under an open license so that the source code can be displayed to all users or modified by them. Such software relies on transparency, collaborative development and peer review. Advantages of open, decentralized and collaboratively developed software are the often significantly lower costs as well as its flexibility and longevity. The freely accessible source code is constantly checked and improved through peer review processes. All changes are transparent and can be reviewed and tracked. By continuously updating the code through the community, bugs can be found and fixed quickly. The community makes its resources, help and perspectives available to everyone. Open source projects are often hosted on GitHub. Other well-known open source projects include Linux, Ansible and Kubernetes.

Emergence: peer-review and open feedback processes

In Internet forums, programmers were able for the first time to enter into a joint exchange worldwide and share their source codes with each other and develop them further. They took advantage of the open and collaborative environment, which favored open feedback processes, and created new standards for open communication and collaboration in the exchange.

Initially, OSS was referred to as free software – based on the freedom to use the software as you wish. But this caused some confusion in the meaning of “free” and “open”, so that it came to the final separation of the terms at the end of the 1990s. Today, however, free software does not mean the same as open source, because with free software only the owners are allowed to access its otherwise closed source code. This is not released for the community for changes. Open source, on the other hand, dispenses with such provider ties and does not primarily stand for the debates about user freedom, but mainly for methodological, production and business aspects of free software.

Open Source Hardware

Open Source Hardware (OSH) also follows the principle and values of Open Source Software. OSH is hardware that is constructed according to open or free blueprints, i.e. the blueprints are made available to the public so that they can not only be viewed, but also shared, further processed and adapted for various new purposes. In the case of modifications, preference is also given here to components that are openly licensed.

Open Government und Open Data

The two terms Open Government and Open Data, which are often used synonymously, originate from the field of politics and administration and stand for a movement to make government data available for the use of the democratic public.

Open Government

Open Government is a democratic approach to participation-oriented opportunities for civil society in the field of politics and administration. It means opening up government and administration – or, more precisely, disclosing their data – to the citizens of the state. In addition to participation, this opening is also intended to create transparency and new forms of cooperation between the state, politics, administration and civil society, to intensify the newly forged bonds and thus also to strengthen common interests and concerns as well as more legitimate political decisions. These goals are also reflected in the four substantive pillars that support the open government movement: citizen participation, transparency, anti-corruption and accountability. To achieve this, however, it is not only data that must be disclosed. The condition for this strategic project, which is intended not only to strengthen democracy but also to increase efficiency in administration, is collaborative cooperation with the population, based on transparency in all decisions and actions. In short, the aim is to use Web 2.0 technologies and an open way of thinking and acting to make administration and government more open and thus more transparent, participatory and cooperative.

Open Data

The Open Government movement is based on the concept of Open Data. Open Data is data of general public interest that is made freely accessible and may be freely redistributed and processed. The focus is primarily on official data, such as statistics, maps, laws, court rulings and other documents and information carriers (open government data). Personal information or other information subject to data protection is excluded. However, the approach is not limited to public administration, but also includes data from universities, non-profit institutions and private-sector companies. Overall, Open Data describes all data. In practice, the data is to be made accessible in as simple and structured a manner as possible, without legal restrictions, in a machine-readable form with the help of Web 2.0 applications. Here, too, the goal is to increase administrative transparency and the social control function.

Open Access

The Open Data ambition to be able to freely share and use data and findings led to the emergence of the Open Access movement, which aims to make public research freely available to the general public. Open Access (OA) means free and open access to scientific publications, such as literature, peer-reviewed research results or other materials for all interested parties worldwide. OA files are always online publications, as research results can be used more flexibly and freely on the Internet. The OA movement emerged in the 1990s on the premise that previous publication structures had led to a privatization of knowledge financed by the general public. In addition to financial aspects, rapid relevance checks, enabling and accelerating scientific collaboration, and better findability of OA publications also speak for the concept of sharing and advancing knowledge.

Publishing and licensing 

If a scientific paper is published under OA conditions, anyone with Internet access is given the opportunity and permission to use it free of charge, i.e. to read it, save it, download it, link to it, etc. Further rights of free use, reproduction, distribution or modification of the publication are regulated by free licenses. In principle, this is done under Creative Commons licenses (CC licenses). The most free form of CC licenses, which corresponds solely to the OA claim, is the so-called CC-BY license, which ensures that the authors are legally protected and always named as authors of the work.
There are two primary ways of OA publishing: the gold way (Gold OA) and the green way (Green OA).

Gold OA

With golden OA, the final version of the publication appears directly in an OA medium, such as books or OA journals that use peer-review processes. In this case, publication fees are often charged to the author. If these are paid by publishers, we speak of Diamond Open Access – the simplest and most fairly perceived form of OA. On the golden way, authors also have the option of hybrid OA, in which they can “buy” their works from publishers. In this case, publishers earn twice.

Green OA

In green open access, the final version of a publication is not made freely available. Instead, parallel publications, secondary publications, or self-archiving on private or institutional websites of the authors occur in addition to the publisher’s version. This means that the authors do not incur any costs when they make their work available free of charge. Such green-published documents are mostly pre- or postprints that have been submitted to the publishers as copies.

Open Science und Open Education

Finally, let us turn to the field of education. Open Science is often used synonymously with Open Access and refers to a collaborative knowledge and science practice in which research data, lab reports, and other research processes are freely accessible. Data, documents, and other material are published for reuse, redistribution, and copying to advance and advance knowledge and research and its underlying data, methods, and concepts. The situation is similar in the field of Open Education, which aims to make education freely available. However, in terms of free access to education, open education is not limited to Internet-based knowledge transfer with the help of free teaching materials (OER) – and is therefore not to be equated with e-learning processes – but is also to be understood as a movement or concept for the development of models that enable all people to participate in education. 

We have compiled further, detailed information on openness in education in the following articles:

Sources:

  1. https://www.redhat.com/de/topics/open-source/what-is-open-source
  2. https://www.buergergesellschaft.de/mitentscheiden/handlungsfelder-themen/digitale-demokratie/open-government/open-government-und-open-data/
  3. https://www.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/publizieren/begriff_oa.html#:~:text=Open%20Access%20(OA)%20bezeichnet%20den,Publikationen%20für%20alle%20Interessierten%20weltweit.&text=Bei%20OA-Publikationen%20handelt%20es,in%20gedruckter%20Form%20erscheinen%20können
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Bündnis Freie Bildung – OER in Germany

OESA has been a member of the Bündnis Freie Bildung (translated: Alliance for Free Education) since August 2020 – what does that mean?

About the Alliance

The Bündnis Freie Bildung is a driving force in the German-speaking OER community. It was founded in 2014 as an initiative of Creative Commons, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and Wikimedia Germany to promote the field of open and free education.

In the meantime, more than twenty organizations, institutions and associations as well as numerous individuals have joined forces in the Alliance to advocate for free education, freely accessible educational materials, open educational practices and open licenses in education – and thus to help shape political decisions and social discussions. As a forum and platform, the alliance therefore organizes events, publishes positions, seeks dialog with decision-makers in politics and administration, and actively engages in discourses around teaching, learning, and education, with the goal of reducing educational inequalities and promoting equal participation in a digital, democratic society.

The Open Education Forum, for example, is part of the Alliance and brings together stakeholders to develop strategies, engage in exchange and provide new ideas. The Alliance’s work focuses on educational materials (Open Educational Resources), software and technology (Open Source), copyright (Open by default), access (Education for All) and pedagogy / didactics (Open Educational Practices).

OER and OEP

The Alliance understands Open Education as a collection of approaches to promote educational opportunities, for example through policies and political measures, the use of open digital educational resources or the use of open courses on the Internet. In this context, openness is not an absolute category, but a relational one, always related to specific social, political, economic, and educational contexts. Because education should always be accessible, participatory, and democratic.

Open Educational Resources (OER), can make a contribution to coming closer to the overall social goal of educational justice. Thanks to open licensing, they can be used by everyone with free software without significant legal and technical difficulties. In particular, they may also be modified, mixed with other materials and republished. This makes it possible to better adapt the cut and scope of materials to the needs of learners and their respective contexts, to keep them up-to-date, and to legally share them worldwide.

Thus, OER are catalysts of contemporary education, because they not only enable self-determined and democratic learning and digital collaboration, but also promote critical reflection on media and their use and open access to education. However, the integration of OER into teaching and learning, i.e. the application of Open Educational Practices (OEP), requires the qualification and further training of teachers, the continuous development of didactic teaching concepts with OER, and appropriate funding.

Open Source

The usability of software in education is still limited. However, software and infrastructures should not restrict learning and teaching, but should provide freedom. Software used for free education should be fundamentally open, sustainable and designable. Open source software offers the possibility to avoid dependencies on certain software companies (lock-in effects), to enable digital sovereignty for educational institutions and not to impose additional hurdles for access – and thus goes hand in hand with the principle of open education, which is much more dependent on standard conformity for a networked infrastructure, which can only be realized through appropriate software and formats. With a view to open standards, networked platforms, independence and transparency, open software offers the possibility for pedagogical designability, adaptation and modification for diverse scenarios in teaching.

OESA and the Alliance

As part of the Bündnis Freie Bildung, we share the same values and work as a non-profit association to promote open education using open software. At the Open Education 2020 forum, our members Celestine Kleinesper and Katharina Mosene co-authored a proposal to transform school libraries into open media centers. The results from this working group were discussed on a livestream with other Alliance working groups and politician:s.

Further information about the Bündnis Freie Bildung: here.

Source: Alliance for Free Education – Position Paper (as of Sep. 2018), released under CC BY 4.0

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Open as standard! But what does “open” mean?

We encounter openness in various contexts: The German government wants to do more for open data, open source software is supposed to be better and literature is supposed to be accessible online through open access – what is actually behind this?

“We are open!”

When something is “open”, it expresses an idea, a conviction. At its core, openness is based on an egalitarian understanding of collaboration and thrives on the conviction of the quality of the many. In short, openness means that something is accessible, free and transparent. This is intended to enable, for example, more communality and accessibility. The idea comes from software development: software packages such as Microsoft Office have to be purchased, and fixing bugs in the software and developing new functions is the exclusive responsibility of Microsoft. The source code, in a sense the “blueprint” of the software, is secret. Open alternatives such as LibreOffice publish their source code so that bugs can be worked out and new functions can be programmed worldwide. With open software, the risk of viruses is minimized and costs kept low.

Free as in free speech, not as in free beer

Open does not necessarily mean that something is free. Rather, it’s about being able to make better use of data and media: Take the example of open science. Behind the term is a scientific practice in which access to scientific publications, research data and software is facilitated through collaboration – with the simple aim of advancing research. Quality assurance and improved information supply are just some of the keywords when it comes to sharing research data worldwide. This process encompasses a whole range of implementation possibilities: from publishing lab reports and datasets in open networks, to making scientific materials available as open resources, to opening up scientific processes to the public. However, if all this is done under the condition of dissemination and copying, the question arises as to how intellectual property can nevertheless be protected.

How can this be compatible with data protection?

Openness as a lived ideal clearly excludes an obligation to freely use one’s own data and media. Everyone should decide for themselves to what extent something can be used. This is made possible by Creative Commons licenses (by the way, the copyright symbol is not legally valid in Germany!): Different license categories specify, for example, whether something may be used for commercial purposes, whether something may be multiplied, or whether the source must be named.

Data security, comprehensibility and transparency, but above all the topics of accessibility, barrier-free access and flexibility guide the complex OPEN.

What does that mean?

In schools, for example, teaching materials can be improved by teachers sharing their lesson plans, proofreading each other’s work, expanding assignments or adapting them to age groups. In this way, the same subject matter can be taught better and better, instead of having to start from scratch every time to prepare a lesson. The key here is not just to use the findings of others for your own purposes, but to contribute something yourself. The digital transformation that everyone is talking about does not simply mean that texts are being digitized and more computers are being used in schools. Rather, it is accompanied by an essential change in values that relates to various professions, but also strongly to personal attitudes. Therefore, an awareness of digital events and a critical reflection with current topics around media and digitization are of great importance.

A look into the future

For sustainable societies, the following will apply: Openness as the fundamental engine of all social practices.

Open is innovative because it always creates new spaces for collaboration, and open is disruptive because it always overturns established ways, systems and structures. Openness is the real core competence of the so-called “21st century skills.” As a social practice, openness is always political, never private. Especially not when we are increasingly talking about topics like quantancomputing and artificial intelligence, open data and borderless data traffic. When we talk about promoting digital education, this alone is far from sufficient, because simply transferring educational resources and processes from analog to digital in fact builds up barriers to competence and in many cases makes access to education more difficult due to the predominantly profit-oriented offerings.

In order to advance free access to knowledge, political and economic incentives are needed to place open access software, open education and open science at the center of education policy action. UNESCO put the topic of OER on its agenda a long time ago, and the EU should do the same. At OESA, we see ourselves as an independent institution for which openness is a top priority and we drive it as part of our work.

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Event: University:Future Festival – Open for discussion

Where is higher education headed in these times? Where are futures emerging that are already groundbreaking for us today? How is higher education re-imagining itself on the path to the “blended university”? These and other questions will be addressed by the University:Future Festival 2021 from November 2 – 4, 2021 under the motto “Open for Discussion”, the largest event of its kind in the German-speaking world. Over three days, impulses will be given and future topics such as hybrid learning, diversity, artificial intelligence and future skills will be discussed. Of course, OESA will also be there!

The Festival

The University:Future Festival is organized by the Hochschulforum Digitalisierung (HFD) in partnership with the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre (StIL). It is aimed at everyone who is engaged with the present and future of academic education: Teachers, students, university management and staff; activists and representatives from civil society, politics and administration; artists and scientists; EdTech founders and journalists. The festival with over 350 speakers and hundreds of program points will take place online in English and German; participation is free of charge.

Our program: OPEN as a standard

On November 02, we’ll talk about openness as an overall concept, openness as the fundamental driver of all social practices, and open source software as a global movement that spans from knowledge and education to urban gardening.

Learn more about the importance of Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Education, Open Access and Co. for society, education and our future:

02.11.2021 17:30 Lightning Talk: the future is OPEN!

Program, tickets and more information: https://festival.hfd.digital/en/

Access

On the event platform of the festival, the Lightning Talk can still be viewed free of charge for a while afterwards.

We have also provided the most important content and findings of our talk on the future-proof concept “OPEN” for you to read in the next article.

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Situation and development of school clouds in Germany

The corona-induced homeschooling or distance learning has put learning with digital media in the focus of public discussion and made clear differences in the use of school clouds in Germany visible. The Institute for Information Management at the University of Bremen (ifib) was therefore commissioned by the Telekom Foundation to conduct a systemic inventory of school learning platforms and IT strategies in all German states and five German municipalities. The recently published study addresses the questions:

  • What is in the various learning platforms that the federal states and also some municipalities offer their schools?
  • How are the systems organized technically?
  • Who provides pedagogical and technical support?
  • How much do these solutions differ from one another?

In addition to an overview of the solutions used, the study also provides a model that systematizes all parts of a learning management system (LMS) and shows what opportunities the respective learning platforms offer students, how the operation of the systems is organized, and who provides pedagogical and technical support. Bavaria, Bremen, Hamburg and Saxony showed a broad set-up of digital media for teaching. In other states, however, different solutions exist side by side in some cases.

The study’s final finding:

There will probably not be a nationwide uniform school cloud solution in Germany – and it is not necessary as long as there are common standards and functioning interfaces for all existing learning management systems in the future.

The benefits of LMSs should have been clear at the latest since the school closures, even though Germany was very late in getting involved with learning platforms by international standards. As true all-rounders, school clouds or learning management systems support teaching and learning processes, simplify organizational processes, and provide a technical basis for communication between teachers, learners, parents, and the school through supplementary offerings from external providers (e.g., by means of video conferencing systems or messenger services).

We at OESA e.V. recommend the following, open source-based systems:

  1. Moodle
  2. ILIAS (developed at the University of Cologne)
  3. and StudIP.

All three are hosted on the school’s own server, are therefore DSGVO-compliant, free of charge and free of advertising, and make it possible to control access rights for the various instances through closed user groups. However, setting up learning environments is highly dependent on the IT infrastructure available in each case; both Moodle and Ilias must be set up and hosted as closed systems on their own servers. Those looking for lower-threshold offerings will have to reckon with a loss of functionality. However, in order to establish open source systems, such as Moodle, in the school context in a long-term, sustainable and future-proof manner, much greater investment in the know-how of the institutions and the competencies of the people is required in addition to the provision of material resources for IT equipment. We have compiled further information on LMS and their didactically meaningful use here.