Key concepts of digital educational resources

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is an initiative to make open licences available worldwide. These open licences offer authors, artists, scientists, lecturers and other creators of copyrighted works the freedom to deal with their copyrights in a flexible way. With a choice of six standard licences, the creator determines to what extent his work may be further disseminated and adapted, and under what conditions.

Digital educational resources

Creative work used for educational purposes, such as texts, images, sound or video, provided digitally. Digital open educational resources that are freely accessible to everyone, or semi-open so that only community members can view, edit, and reuse the material, or commercial material. Lecturers make it available to their students or students find and use the educational resources independently in their studies.

Hallmark

A quality mark is an instrument by and for professional communities and shows colleagues that the educational resources found are of a high quality.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs)

A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course designed for an unlimited number of participants. A MOOC is freely accessible and free (unless you want a verified certificate). A MOOC not only provides students with access to educational resources, but gives them a complete course experience. In principle, students do not receive formal credits (ECTS credits) when they complete a MOOC.

Metadata

Metadata are data that describe the characteristics of educational resources, for example author, education level, subject area file format and so on in a repository. This makes the educational resources findable for users and the repository complies with international standards for data exchange.

Open courseware

Open courseware refers to a compiled set of educational resources (see open content). Open courseware is freely available for use/reuse. Users can copy, edit and distribute these educational resources under certain conditions by using an open licence (such as Creative Commons). With open courseware, the educational resources are central; students therefore receive no guidance and cannot earn ECTS credits for them.

Open educational resources

Digital educational resources published with an open licence, such as Creative Commons. Such a licence allows users to copy, (re)use, edit, re-arrange and distribute the work. Internationally, open educational resources are called Open Educational Resources (OER).

Open education

Open education is freely available, freely accessible and open for editing. Open education can be online, face-to-face or a combination of these (blended). Open for editing means that the educational resources are published with an open licence.

Repository

A repository is a digital repository for materials accessible via Internet. It allows higher education institutions to make their educational resources and research results internally and/or externally accessible. A repository also contains metadata about the materials; this makes the materials findable for users and the repository meets international standards for data exchange.

Learning community

A subject community is a group of lecturers from different educational institutions who work in the same field, domain or discipline and have organised themselves in some form around the shared content expertise.

Vocabulary

A subject vocabulary is a list of the most important keywords from a subject area. It is based on the common language between peers.