The paper describes the concept of a federated ecosystem for Open Educational Resources (OER) in the German education system. Here, a variety of OER repositories (ROER) (Muuß-Merholz & Schaumburg, 2014) and reference platforms have been established in the recent past. In order to develop this ecosystem, not only are metadata standards necessary, but also open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are required in order to exchange information. In conclusion, it is essential that all relevant stakeholders agree on an explicit policy to be developed collaboratively. A metadata exchange service can serve to connect all partners.
The incisive developments during the COVID-19 pandemic have made the importance of online learning for education in the digital age evident, and it is unlikely that this wheel will be turned back in the foreseeable future (Brown, 2021). First experiences show, for instance, that online learning can support the development of digital education and the practices of student engagement (Gourlay et al., 2021) and can lead to an openness towards learning innovation that was not present before the COVID-19 pandemic (Rapanta et al., 2021). However, as the term “online” learning implies, the internet has played and will play a key role in developing and distributing new forms of teaching and learning.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.