Copyright and OER

Copyright issues play a central role for both teachers and learners. The copyright amendment that came into force in October 2015 has provided legal certainty in many areas of teaching. Nevertheless, many things remain unclear and specific cases can lie in a legal grey area. 
Therefore, Graz University of Technology recommends moving in the direction of Open Educational Resources, OER for short. This was stipulated in the policy on open educational resources at Graz University of Technology (OER policy) published in 2020.

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials of any kind and in any medium that are published under an open licence. Such an open licence allows free access as well as free use, editing and redistribution by others with little or no restrictions. Open Educational Resources can include individual materials but also complete courses or books. Any medium can be used. Curricula, course materials, textbooks, streaming videos, multimedia applications, podcasts - all these resources are OER if they have been published under an open licence" (UNESCO definition)

The team of Educational Technology strives to educate teachers and learners as best as possible and to actively support the creation, (re-)use, editing and dissemination of OER. In this context, a separate OER plugin was created for the teaching and learning platform TeachCenter, which allows teachers (after appropriate OER certification) to automatically upload their own teaching materials as declared OER from their TeachCenter courses to the OER repository of TU Graz and thus publish them. We also set a positive example by publishing teaching and learning materials exclusively as OER in accordance with the OER policy.
Here is a small excerpt of OERs created and published by us so far:

• The multiple award-winning textbook L3T
• TELucation website and its articles
• how-to guides for the platforms TeachCenter and TeachCenterExam as well as for video conferencing systems, also to be found on TELucation
• MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) on iMooX.at
• the OER-Canvas, an aid for the creation of OERs for university lecturers

Staff members of the OU Educational Technolgy also offer in-house training for university lecturers on the topic of OER. This also allows you to obtain the nationally recognized OER certificate.

The following offers are available:

• "OER certificate from fnma at TU Graz"

• "OER certificate from fnma at TU Graz for ESD participants"

• "OER update (intensive) of TU Graz for the OER certificate of fnma"

Graz University of Technology cooperates with the association Forum Neue Medien in der Lehre Austria (fnma - Forum New Media in Teaching Austria), which certifies universities in the field of copyright and OER throughout Austria within the Open Education Austria Advancd project (OEAA). The above-mentioned continuing education programmes are accredited by fnma and standardised throughout Austria. Completing one of them entitles you to receive the fnma-accredited certificate OER Practitioner.

TU Graz also offers all lecturers an OER repository for publishing their OER. This is made possible as soon as the OER certification has been completed as part of the continuing education program. Information on certification and publishing your own OER can be found in the TELucation article of the same name.

There is also an opportunity for continuing education within the framework of eDidactics, a continuing education programme by the Styrian University Conference. Parts of the programme are taught by staff members of the OU Educational Technology.

In addition, the organisational unit researches and publishes on the topic of OER in higher education teaching, see publications. The UNESCO recommendation on Open Educational Resources states that particular attention should be paid to monitoring and measuring the impact of OER. Graz University of Technology also includes this in its OER policy and has therefore decided to publish an annual OER impact report after extensive preparatory work (Ebner, Orr & Schön 2022; Ebner et al. 2022). This report provides a clear overview of OER developments at TU Graz and, if necessary, also takes up a key topic from the previous year. The reports are, of course, made available under an open license (see sidebar).