Digital educational resources

By taking action together, we can encourage the sharing and reuse of digital educational resources and make education future-proof. Together, we will ensure that students and lecturers always have access to high-quality educational resources wherever they are and that they can easily find them in one place. Will you join us?

Digital educational resources explained

Digital educational resources are digitally available resources such as texts, images, audio files or videos that are used for educational purposes. This can range from individual items such as web lectures and articles, to complete open courses. Anything you deploy in the teaching-learning process falls under educational resources - whether that is material that lecturers provide to students, or materials that students find and use independently in their studies.

New way of working

For optimal educational provision, educational institutions encourage their lecturers and students to put together and use an optimal mix of digital educational resources in one place. From open digital educational resources freely accessible to everyone, or semi-open materials available only to community members, to commercial material from publishers. Sharing and reusing digital educational resources means a new way of working, not only for lecturers, but also for other stakeholders such as information specialists and librarians, as current materials are now often developed on a one-off basis.

In the Declaration National Approach to Digital and Open Educational Resources, Dutch higher education institutions and SURF agreed to jointly promote the creation, sharing, reuse and procurement of digital educational resources. In addition, a vision document defines the building blocks we can use to create an optimal mix of educational resources in 2025.

SURF and digital educational resources

Via the edusources platform, SURF makes digital educational resources easy to find and search in one central location. To this end, we use innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence, and we collaborate with EdTech suppliers, startups, publishers and educational institutions on its further development. Within the platform, we guarantee data security and privacy and ensure solid architecture and standardisation. Finally, we ensure that the legal aspects, such as licences and contract models, are well regulated, so that all educational resources can be used correctly.