Building OER Competence Across the Unite! Alliance. Insights from the "Unite! OER Courses" Project. Presentation at Unite! Ed Future Conference, March 13, 2025

The "Unite! OER Courses" seed fund project successfully advanced Open Educational Resources (OER) competence among students and lecturers across the Unite! alliance. A major milestone was the development of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on OER, licensed under CC BY 4.0 International and translated into 11 languages, including Turkish and Indonesian, with the help of AI avatars and tools. Since its launch on May 6, 2024, the MOOC has attracted over 1,200 participants. Additionally, an OER course in English was introduced on the Unite! federated learning management system Metacampus.
To further enhance capacity, a dedicated OER training for lecturers was conducted, which resulted in the publication of a collection of tools and methods for future OER training initiatives. In this contribution, we build upon previous work, particularly insights from our project report (Unite, 2024) and various presentations on the topic, including preliminary findings on the impact at partner universities (Schön et al., n.d., submitted for JODDE).
Methodologically, we addressed different research questions primarily through a case study, allowing us to analyse the implementation, reception, and institutional effects of the OER initiatives within the alliance. The collected data provides valuable insights for the establishment of a future Unite! Open Science Academy.
This presentation will share the project’s achievements, methodologies, and outcomes while addressing challenges and opportunities for promoting OER practices in international higher education settings.

References

Unite! (2025). Unite! Seed Fund Technical Report: Unite! OER Courses. Unite! University Alliance. Unpublished Report.

Ebner, M., & Schön, S. (2024). Der erste multilinguale MOOC zum Thema der Open Educational Resources: Rolle, Möglichkeiten und Herausforderungen des Einsatzes von KI bei der Erstellung von Videos mit Avataren der Lehrenden [The first multilingual MOOC on Open Educational Resources: Role, opportunities, and challenges of using AI for creating videos with teacher avatars]. Presentation at OEAD-Tagung, 14 November 2024, St. Pölten. Graz University of Technology. https://doi.org/10.3217/jx9w7-qw453

Schön, S., Brünner, B., Ebner, M., Edelsbrunner, S., Hohla-Sejkora, K., & Uhl, B. (2025). Early findings from pilots in AI-driven education: Effects of AI-generated courses and videos on learning and teaching. In M. E. Auer & D. May (Eds.), 2024 Yearbook Emerging Technologies in Learning (Learning and Analytics in Intelligent Systems Series, Vol. 44). Springer Nature.

Schön, S., Ebner, M., Hohla-Sejkora, K., Keller, E., Rapp, A., Ribeiro, M. H., Segradin, R., & Vicente Sáez, R. (n.d.). A multilingual OER online course – A case study of OER production and usage in and beyond a European University Alliance. Journal of Digital and Distributed Education. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Schön, S. (2024). Hilfe, ich wurde avatarisiert! Veränderungen in der videobasierten Lehre [Help, I've been avatarized! Changes in video-based teaching.]. Keynote at ViTeach 2024, 10 September 2024, Online. https://dx.doi.org/10.3217/cy2wb-f2t67; Video: https://video.vcrp.de/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=4bfec7a9-aee1-4c16-b3f8-b1e70142a363

Vicente-Sáez, R., Schön, S., & Ebner, M. (2024). Unite! University Alliance’s OER project Unite! OER courses – An open education initiative to develop open science competencies within Unite! (10/2023–09/2024). Presentation, 13 March 2024, in the series Aalto RDM & Open Science Training. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10812652; 
video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbnNUYbccpw