OER have been attracting great interest in higher education teaching for several years. Especially with regard to the growing use of digital educational materials, they have many advantages. Thanks to the free licences, teachers can integrate them into their courses free of charge and in a legally secure manner.

Further links:

• General or subject-specific information on the topic of OER: OERinfo
• Dossier on current developments and information on OER: University Forum on Digitisation
• Self-study course in the FHP Moodle on law in teaching, first lesson on Creative Commons and OER: You can start the course here. Please log in with your campus account.

An essential feature of OER is that it is published under a free licence. With the licence, the author(s) indicate the conditions for the use of the OER. The most common licences for publishing Open Content are the Creative Commons (CC) licences. The CC-BY- 4.0 licence is suitable for OER.

• more information on Creative Commons licences: Creative Commons Licences main website
• Self-study course in the FHP-Moodle on Law in Teaching, first lesson on Creative Commons and OER: You can start the course here. Please log in with your campus account.
• iRIGHTS.info is a platform on copyright issues and related topics. There you can find out about ongoing legal changes.
• 10 years of HOOU - 10 questions about AI output, copyright and OER,  HOOU@HAW Hamburg | Andrea Schlotfeldt, CC BY 4.0 (2025)

In the German-speaking world, there are several online repositories where OER are made available for several different subject areas.

• HOOU - Hamburg Open Online University
  The online platform HOOU provides OER on various subjects, such as computer science, information science, philosophy and psychology, social sciences, technology, applied sciences, history and art.
• ORCA - Open Resources Campus
  ORCA.nrw contains materials on a wide range of subjects, including physics, civil engineering, business administration, architecture, psychology, design.
• TWILLO
  The portal Twillo from Lower Saxony contains educational materials on subjects such as engineering, mathematics and natural sciences, law, economics and social sciences, humanities, arts and art sciences.
• Virtual Academy Sustainability
  The University of Bremen makes digital courses for students on sustainability topics freely available on the platform Virtuelle Akademie Nachhaltigkeit.
• ZOERR - Central Open Educational Resources Repository
  The ZOERR of the universities in Baden-W¨¹rttemberg offers open educational materials on subjects such as engineering, humanities, law, economics and social sciences, mathematics, natural sciences and the arts.
• OERSI
  The search index for OER in higher education of the Technische Informationsbibliothek Hannover (TIB) and the Hochschulbibliothekszentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen (hbz) can be used to find further German-language OER repositories.
• AI Campus
  Self-study courses on the topic of AI/AI with focus on: Chatbots and voice assistants, data literacy, AI in education, AI in medicine.
  Some of the courses can be used free of charge. However, they are not OER material.

• MITOPENCOURSEWARE
  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) shares university courses under an OER licence on the platform. There are mainly courses on technical topics.
• MoodleNet
  The Moodle community shares OER Moodle courses on various topics. You can also make your Moodle courses available as OER material to other Moodle users via MoodleNet.
• TU Delft OpenCourseWare
  TU Delft shares its university courses on the platform under an OER licence. There are mainly courses from the technical field such as energy, infrastructure and mobility, environment, water and health.

First legal commentary on the Creative Commons licenses published in open access - a milestone for open legal scholarship (Potsdam, 25.04.2025)

With the publication of the ¡°Creative Commons Public License - Commentary and Handbook for Legal Practice¡±, a legal commentary on the Creative Commons Licenses (CCPL) is published for the first time in Germany - completely openly licensed. The work is not only a new standard work on the legal interpretation of the globally established licenses, but also a pioneering OpenRewi e.V. project for an open, diverse and collaborative legal science.

The Creative Commons licenses, on which billions of digital works worldwide are based today (creativecommons.org), are a central instrument of open science, culture and education. In Germany, their use is expressly recommended by politicians, scientists and research funders, particularly in these areas. Despite their great importance, a comprehensive legal commentary for legal practice has been lacking until now - this gap is now being closed.

The new work analyzes the current license version 4.0 in detail and brings together key questions of interpretation, case law and literature for the first time. It is aimed not only at legal experts, but also at practitioners in the fields of science, education and culture. The handbook section provides practical answers to frequently asked questions, such as the interpretation of the ¡°non-commercial¡± clause, the relationship between CCPL and German general terms and conditions law, public domain or the relevance of licenses in the context of generative AI.

"The commentary aims to be a source of inspiration for the opening up of jurisprudence. It shows how legal knowledge can be made accessible in a collaborative, open and high-quality manner - in the spirit of a scientific infrastructure that benefits everyone," says co-editor Prof. Dr. Ellen Euler, Professor of Library Science - Open Access/Open Data at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, who has been working on Open Access, Creative Commons and open infrastructures in the legal context for many years.

OpenRewi e.V. as a driving force for open legal scholarship

The project is a publication project of OpenRewi e.V., a network for the promotion of openly licensed legal scholarship materials. It was implemented in a decentralized, cooperative and transparent collaboration between 19 authors from the fields of law, the judiciary, the legal profession and politics - many of whom have been active since the early days of Creative Commons. 

¡°The fact that this commentary is openly accessible was a matter of course for us,¡± emphasizes Euler. ¡°A work that deals with open licenses in particular must not disappear behind paywalls.¡±

High standards for open access publication

High demands were also placed on the digital and printed publication. The chosen publisher meets all the criteria for modern open access specialist publications - including accessibility, DOI allocation for the complete work and individual chapters, long-term archiving, metadata provision and distribution via international open access repositories. Data protection was a particular concern: access and downloads take place without the collection of personal data.

Open for collaboration and further development

The commentary is freely available under digital license and is also published as a book by Carl Grossmann. Further development together with the community on the Open Access Commentary (OAK) platform is planned for the second half of 2025 - including experimental environments for collaborative editing.

Boehm, Franziska; Euler, Ellen; Klimpel, Paul; Rack, Fabian; Weitzmann, John. Creative Commons Public License (CCPL) - Commentary and Handbook for Legal Practice. 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24921/2025.94115974

The group "Happiness Reflection Card Set" was developed by Prof. Dr. Antje Michel. It is aimed at interdisciplinary student project groups. With the help of the reflection cards, a shared meta-knowledge about the individual expectations, knowledge, experiences, ways of working and the knowledge-cultural imprint of the group participants is developed discursively. This meta-knowledge supports effective cooperation as a team.

The questions are divided into the following categories:

• Values & Attitudes
• Goals & Motivation
• Working methods & competences
• Framework
• Motivators
• The reflection card set includes a guide.

The collection of questions was developed at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam to promote understanding in interdisciplinary, learning project working groups. It was developed in 2016 - 2019 in an iterative process involving three years of the master's programme "Urban Futures" (years 1 - 3). The visual design of the group "Happiness Reflection Card Set" was done by interface design graduate Niko Ripka.

The reflection card set is available as a digital version for use, as a digital open version for further development and editing, and as a print template for use as printed material. The open files for the further development of the printed version, including the style guide, are available from the author on request.

The certificate course "Research Data Management" was designed and implemented with significant participation of the FHP. All materials are published as OER. The project was led by Prof. Dr. Heike Neuroth and Carsten Schneemann from the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam together with Dr. Daniela Mertzen and Kathrin Woywod. Other project participants were Claudia Haase, Boris Jacob, Max Kroehling, Jens Mittelbach, Dr Janine Straka, Anita Szczukowski and Katrin Weise.

The course takes into account a variety of organisational, formal, technical, content-related and didactic aspects that are important for the development of suitable teaching materials. The certificate course, which is the responsibility of the state initiative "Research Data Management in Brandenburg" (FDM-BB), took place for the first time at the beginning of March 2023 as a one-week digital Spring School with 30 bachelor's and master's students from the eight Brandenburg universities. The certificate course, which takes place at least once a year, can be credited with two to four ECTS credits, depending on the scope of the examination. The entire course consists of a preparatory self-study phase including a quiz (approx. 10 hours), active participation in the Spring School (40 hours, a total of 2 ECTS credits) and optionally a follow-up examination (approx. 25 or 50 hours, 3 or 4 ECTS credits).

A total of eleven lecturers from the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and the University of Potsdam from different professional areas of responsibility (research and teaching, research support, library) convey the teaching content (see point (ii)).

The collection of materials made available here for re-use includes:

(A) The module manual of the certificate course (a PDF file).

(B) The entire teaching scripts (one PDF file) with the following module courses (MK):

• MK 1: Introduction to Research Data Management; Research Data Lifecycle and FAIR Data Principles; Open Science; Exercises
• MK 2: Data Documentation and Metadata; Data Management Plans; Data Management Plans with the Research Data Management Organiser (RDMO); Exercise.
• MK 3: Active data management; long-term archiving; collaborative tools and versioning; exercise
• MK 4: Data publication, persistent identification, citation; licences, Re3Data; legal aspects of FDM; exercise.
• MK 5: Good scientific practice; project management; exercise; discussion, evaluation and individual counselling for examination performance

(C) Literature recommendations (one PDF file)

(D) Quiz questions (of the preparatory self-study phase of the course). Quiz questions are deposited here without correct answers, as they will be used in the following certificate course; we will be happy to provide them to teachers/lecturers on request (info-fdm-bb@listserv.dfn.de).

OER-Course: https://zenodo.org/record/7936966

In his seminar on Code-Driven Design, Prof. Dr. Sebastian Meier and FHP graduate and teaching assistant Jolanta Paliszweska have developed a blended learning course and published it as an OER. The e-learning course offers beginners a starting point for designing through programming. The course can be used as an accompaniment to the seminar or as a stand-alone learning offer. The focus is on interfaces between artefacts, which can be generated by code, and other applications and manufacturing processes. JavaScript is used as the programming language.

The seminar is structured in such a way that the content can be acquired in an equally effective way via reading/videos/trying things out, thus enabling multimodal access to knowledge. In addition, all videos are available in German and English and have subtitles. Furthermore, the first part of the seminar (introduction and 2D graphics) has already been transferred into sign language videos (40 videos). The second part is also to be transferred accordingly.

In the German-speaking and also international area, the introduction to (creative) programming in sign language to this extent is a novelty. It should be emphasised that the videos are not a "simple" translation by sign language interpreters, but videos specially created by a deaf designer.

More information on the seminar"Parametric Design. Introduction to Code-Driven Design

Within the framework of the MWFK-funded project on the Open Access Strategy of the State of Brandenburg, not only the strategy itself was developed with the participation of a committed and diverse network and published under a CC0 licence. Under the direction of Prof. Dr. Ellen Euler, further materials were created in the project. For example, a package of icons for visualising topics related to OA, science communication, publications, research processes and actors is now available for free reuse (information at creativecommons.org), e.g. for presentations or explanatory videos.

More information on Open Access in Brandenburg

The aim of Prof. Dr. Julia Maria Stru? 's project module is for students to develop a prototype for an e-learning offer as an OER on the topic of automatic indexing for other subsequent students. This should also be able to be used and further developed by others beyond the project course. For this purpose, the teacher makes her own extensive scripts on the topic of the planned OER resource available to the students. The exchange with external speakers on the topic of OER is also important.

The students in the project seminar acquire the following competences:

• Develop practical project skills

• Deepening critical and analytical thinking skills as well as problem-solving and decision-making skills

• Teamwork

• implementing application-oriented project work scientifically

• scientific and practical examination of Open Educational Resources

• Development of digital learning materials taking into account OER and subject area material

The students, in the courses in which the OER e-learning offer is used, acquire the following competences:

• Basic knowledge of automatic indexing

• Methods and areas of application of automatic indexing