Philipps-Universität Marburg

Free licenses

Labeling the material

Regardless of which license is chosen, you must provide materials that are available for download with a corresponding reference to the license of the material. If you upload material to the OER area of Philipps-Universität Marburg, you must provide it with a free license, which is stored in the object metadata. Third parties can download your material from there and use it further. To ensure that the downloaded material is still easily recognizable as freely licensed, the license notice must be visibly displayed on all materials. This means that the license is visible independently of the object metafiles, for example on PDFs or slides.

Tip: Always try to place the notice as close to the material as possible. In text documents and PDFs, this can be a notice as described above; if you publish a podcast or similar audio file, it is a good idea to include the publication as OER and the selected license in the introduction.

TULLU citation

If you have already used existing material to create your OER, you must of course cite this. The TULLU citation style has become established for citing OER. The formula can be used as an aid to remember what information users need in order to experience security and transparency when using it. The formula stands for:

Recommendations for ILIAS objects

As the provision of OER at Philipps-Universität is carried out via ILIAS, we would like to give some tips here on which types of ILIAS objects are particularly suitable for OER. Fine-grained ILIAS objects have so far been easier to share and process than larger-format ILIAS objects such as complete ILIAS courses. By fine-grained materials, we mean individual materials used for a course, such as individual worksheets, video or audio files or learning modules. See also ➥Licensing in ILIAS. 

ILIAS courses can currently only be imported to other ILIAS platforms by using export files. This can cause additional problems, as plug-ins such as learning progress and badges may not be copied. We therefore recommend fine-grained ILIAS objects.

Please note that different laws apply to teaching than to OER. Since OER is a worldwide publication, different laws apply than for seminars that you conduct as a lecturer at a university, for example. In particular, the limitation rule does not apply.

Tip: Instead of including materials such as essays or excerpts from books in your OER as you might do for an internal course, refer to suitable material, for example as follows: “The following text is particularly suitable for reading...”.

Recommendations for file formats

As far as file formats are concerned, we recommend using formats that are as open as possible to facilitate further processing and use as well as usability. Open formats are those that allow the material to be used and processed with programs that are as widespread, available and accessible as possible. Here, the consideration can relate to the use of locally installed programs or to the use of pure web applications. Formats accessible via the Internet, such as 3D tours, are very accessible as they only require Internet access, but they usually require quite specialized software for editing. We therefore recommend working with the most widely used file formats when creating the materials.

In addition to the accessibility of the file formats, their longevity also plays a role in the sustainable usability of OER. Some file formats are more suitable for the long-term provision of OER than others..

For text or presentation files, we recommend Open Document Formats (ODF) such as .odt (for text files) or .opt (for presentations). Most Office programs allow saving in this file format. ODF is intended to enable the exchange of documents independently of specific programs. Under certain circumstances, the layout and formatting of these files may not be identical if they are used with different programs or devices and users do not have the corresponding applications. In some cases, this can be easily prevented, for example by using fonts such as Arial and Times that are as widely used as possible. (Further helpful information on fonts: https://open-educational-resources.de/texte-und-schriftarten.) Although PDF files, unlike odt files, have the advantage that the layout and formatting always look the same, this is more of a disadvantage in relation to OER, as PDF files can only be edited with great effort and can therefore make it more difficult to edit the material freely.

Tip: If possible, use open file formats such as .pdf or .odf for your OER, provided the material is suitable, in order to facilitate the further processing of your OER. It is up to the creator to decide which file format is suitable for a particular OER. In principle, it is also possible to provide a Pdf for viewing and an Odf for further processing.

OER created in cooperation 

In the case of OER created in cooperation with several persons (as co-authors), the responsibility for the content of the OER material lies equally with all persons involved. This also means that all persons involved must agree on the license used for publication and are all equally responsible for compliance with copyright law. In addition, OER are publications; it is therefore essential that permission for publication and consent to the selected license is obtained from all originators in the case of collaboratively created OER.

DOI

DOI stands for digital object identfier and is used to make it easier to find digital objects (articles, image files, etc.). In principle, DOIs can also be used for OER, as these are also digital objects. At Philipps-Universität, DOIs for OER can be assigned via the research data repository (data_UMR). This means that the corresponding OER are stored both on the Ilias platform and in the data_UMR repository.

DOIs can only be meaningfully assigned to a specific object and can be used to locate a specific OER in a specific location. If changes are made to this OER or if this OER is uploaded, it is no longer the same object at the same location and a new DOI should be assigned. In our opinion, DOIs are therefore particularly unsuitable for tracking the change process of an OER.

The degree of change at which an object should receive a new DOI is also not clearly defined; a change of DOI is recommended after a far-reaching change to the object or to distinguish between different versions of the object. (“As a general rule, if the change is substantial and/or it is necessary to identify both the original and the changed material, then it is wide to assign a new DOI name”; “Generally speaking, if the change is substantial and/or it is necessary to identify both the original and the changed material, then it makes sense to assign a new DOI name.”, cf. https://www.doi.org/the-identifier/resources/faqs)

Usage of university logo

If you would like to use the university logo, please contact the [xln url=“https://www.uni-marburg.de/de/universitaet/presse”]University Communications Office[/xln].

Accessibility

Free access to content also means reducing barriers. At Philipps-Universität Marburg, all information on digital accessibility is collected in the associated portal: [xln url=“https://www.uni-marburg.de/de/studium/service/sbs/digitale-barrierefreiheit”]https://www.uni-marburg.de/de/studium/service/sbs/digitale-barrierefreiheit[/xln]

Support structures

We offer various support services for the creation, provision and use of OER.

We offer support in the production and quality optimization of OER, should creators wish to take advantage of this. Quality standards are important to us, but quality is always subjective. In addition, the diversity of OER requires different approaches. Aspects that can nevertheless always be taken into account are scientific standards, topicality appropriate to the content and accessibility. What can also increase the quality of an OER is a contextualization of the material in the sense that information is provided on the context in which the material was created and for which target groups the creators consider it particularly suitable.

We provide the necessary infrastructure for the use, production and provision of OER. If the creators wish to make OER available at Philipp-Universität Marburg, this is done via the Ilias learning platform. To this end, we offer our members support services for the technical aspects of providing OER.

Please note that although we can guarantee the provision of OER via Ilias, creators should ensure the long-term storage of their OER materials on their own responsibility.

We also welcome and encourage the participation of our members in competitions or tenders on the subject of OER.