Digital educational resources

What challenges do institutions face?

Institutions want to encourage lecturers and students to put together and use an optimum mix of digital educational resources in one place. Digital open educational resources that are freely accessible to everyone, or semi-open so that only community members can view, edit, and reuse the material, or commercial material. Not only for lecturers, but also other stakeholders such as information specialists and library staff, sharing and reusing educational resources means a new way of working.

Challenges include:

• How do you form a vision for digital educational resources?
• How do you set up your organisation to support and encourage the lecturer in this process?
• What technology do you need?
• How can lecturers use digital educational resources in their teaching practice?

What is SURF doing to make more diverse educational resources available?

SURF makes it possible to easily find and search digital educational resources in one place, whether from publishers, lecturers or students. Innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence, contribute to this; so does the development and application of standards. We are experimenting with EdTech vendors and startups, publishing houses and institutions to make strides in this. We ensure that security and privacy, architecture and standardisation are secured, as well as licensing and contract models. The edusources service, the platform for digital educational resources, was launched in early 2021.

Innovation on digital (open) educational resources

SURF is working with Npuls' Digital Learning Resources Transformation Hub and the Open & Online Education Libraries Working Group on the technical further development of edusources to enable lecturers to collaborate more easily in sharing and using/reusing digital learning resources. We want to facilitate this both locally and from a national community where knowledge and experiences are shared. Reuse is an important point of attention.

Incentive scheme - pillar Open Educational Resources

Within the Incentive Scheme for Open and Online Education, we encourage lecturers to publish the educational resources they develop under an open licence and to cooperate with colleagues from other institutions. Co-creating and building on each other's work leads to quality improvement and economies of scale for higher education, providing students with affordable high-quality digital study materials.

View the projects of participating subject communities