Open educational resources

Are you a student looking for extra support in your studies, or a teacher seeking inspiration for a lecture or module such as an open statistics module that you can expand as a teacher or work through at your own pace as a student? Make use of so-called digital open educational resources, also known as Open Educational Resources (OER).

Discover platforms like Edusources, open textbooks, and online open courses where you have direct access to high-quality learning materials that can be adapted to your needs. Explore these platforms and start enriching your learning or teaching process!

What are open educational resources?

OER are developed by vocational schools, universities of applied sciences, and universities. OER are freely accessible educational and research materials, in any format (such as text, video, audio), and are free to use, adapt, and share. The materials are available under an open license or in the public domain, meaning anyone may use, adapt, and distribute these materials with no or limited restrictions.
The goal of OER is to make knowledge accessible and to enrich flexible learning by offering various types of open materials from different institutions.

Benefits of open educational resources:

  • Efficiency – Teachers save time by reusing and adapting existing materials.
  • Diversity – Access to a wide range of materials from different institutions.
  • Flexibility – Materials are free to use and can be adapted as needed.
  • Quality improvement – Collaboration and sharing expertise help raise educational quality.

What open educational resources are available?

Think of digital educational materials such as (interactive) textbooks, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), open courseware, videos, webinars, podcasts, research publications, digital readers, virtual reality simulations, etc.

Co-creation and participation

Open educational resources encourage collaboration between teachers and students. Co-creation promotes ownership of the learning process, where students can:

  • Provide feedback on existing material
  • Add their own cases, assignments, or examples
  • Help with translations
  • Develop new applications (such as interactive books, quizzes, or videos)

Using open educational resources

Open educational resources also support blended learning, an approach that combines in-person teaching with online resources like OER to enrich and make the learning process more flexible. For example, by offering open digital modules, knowledge clips, or interactive e-books before class, students can prepare at their own pace. In-person sessions can then focus on deeper learning, such as working on cases or discussing practical examples. This combination increases engagement, encourages active learning, and makes education more personal and accessible for everyone. OER are ideal for this: they are freely available, adaptable, and can be easily integrated into both the online and in-person parts of education.

Browse the following sources for open educational resources:

The library also offers learning materials (both closed and open) in the form of articles, e-books, and audiobooks via the A-Z databases/digital resources.

Adding open educational resources

Interested in sharing HHs learning materials? Tip: use the Collegeweb recording studios to record professional lectures or knowledge clips.

The university library offers the following support:

  • Finding open educational resources
  • Sharing and publishing HHs open educational resources via the national platform Edusources (according to a quality model and criteria)

There is also information available on copyright, advice regarding CC licenses, and reuse of materials.
Contact [email protected], also if you want to work on a theme, contribute ideas, or make improvements. Join the national subject community via Edusources or start your own with colleagues, for example around a theme in which The Hague University of Applied Sciences is particularly active.