Platforms
Finding open educational resources – the key platforms and collections
Are you looking for suitable teaching materials such as worksheets, course templates or interactive videos for your teaching? There are numerous platforms for Open Educational Resources in German-speaking countries, most of which are designed to be interdisciplinary and offer various filter functions. The Open Educational Resources Search Index, or OERSI for short, is the central search engine for open educational resources in higher education. OERSI brings together metadata from state repositories, institutional collections and subject-specific portals into a single search interface with filters for subject area, resource type, licence and language.
The first East German portal for the state of Brandenburg is currently being developed as part of the Co-WOERK collaborative project at the Universities of Potsdam and BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg and is expected to go live in early 2027.
twillo — Lower Saxony. Portal for Open Educational Resources in higher education, featuring comprehensive information and guides on searching for and creating OER.
ORCA.nrw — North Rhine-Westphalia. Portal dedicated to digitally supported teaching and learning, filterable by subject area, licence, resource type and language.
ZOERR — Baden-Württemberg. Central repository for higher education institutions in Baden-Württemberg for the publication, exchange and editing of open educational resources. Open to all higher education institutions in Germany.
HOOU — Hamburg. Under the slogan ‘University knowledge – open to all’, the Hamburg Open Online University promotes innovative digital learning resources and makes them freely available.
Humanities and Social Sciences:
Europeana — Access to digitised cultural heritage from European libraries, archives and museums. Works of art, historical documents, photographs.
Project Gutenberg — Over 70,000 free e-books, predominantly public-domain works from the fields of literature, philosophy and history.
OER Commons — An international platform featuring resources across a wide range of disciplines and formats — from textbooks and syllabuses to videos. Provides its own tools for creating and remixing resources under a Creative Commons licence.
MERLOT — A curated, peer-reviewed collection of online learning resources, supported by an international educational community. Well suited to economics, political science and sociology.
https://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
MIT OpenCourseWare — Freely accessible course materials from over 2,500 MIT courses — lecture notes, videos, exercises, exams. Particularly strong in STEM subjects, but also covers the humanities and social sciences. CC-licensed.
OpenLearn — Free learning platform from the Open University (UK) covering a wide range of subjects — from history and natural sciences to languages.
https://www.open.edu/openlearn