# Qualification and cooperative support for OER - a buffet of cooperation, JOINTLY
###### tags: `article` `JOINTLY` `OER`

*JOINTLY supports cooperation among multipliers and IT experts who are establishing OER in education. Concepts, materials and software tools are developed in cooperative formats, edited by the JOINTLY team, tested by the community and jointly transferred into educational practice.*

:::info
+ **Funding reference:** 01PO16011C
+ **Project duration:** 01.11.2016 – 30.04.2018
+ **Project management:** Dr. Paul Klimpel, iRights
+ **Project team:** Annett Zobel, Dr. Philipp Wieder, PD Dr. Markus Deimann
+ **Project website:** http://jointly.info
+ **Contact:** [e-mail]
+ **Collection of OER from this project:** https://uhh.de/j1c74
+ **Funding:** BMBF
:::

Short link to this page: http://bit.ly/jointly18-en

## Table of Contents
[TOC]

## Project Informationen
JOINTLY is one of three intersectoral projects in the OERinfo funding programme. Project partners are iRights e. V., edu-sharing NETWORK e.V., Technische Hochschule Lübeck (University of Applied Sciences) and Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen (GWDH).

JOINTLY supports multipliers in establishing OER in the German education sector. By cooperating across projects and actors, joint concepts, materials and software tools are developed.

In the field of OER qualification and raising awareness, multipliers jointly developed specifications for target groups, appropriate formats for raising awareness, competence profiles as well as other concepts and basics. Together, they developed an OER training kit, an OER e-book and other materials that are offered on the OER content buffet for further use and modification. In trainers' workshops qualification concepts and materials were tested and lessons learned from their own trainings were shared.

In addition to the OER content buffet, which is part of the OERinfo website, a series of brochures, a hotline, webinars, newsletters, and active participation in various events like the OERcamps are provided as well.

IT specialists and practitioners shared their knowledge on technology, standards and OER-enabling functionality in workshops and online formats. They developed software concepts and interfaces to extend existing institutional systems into an OER-friendly IT infrastructure.

Prototypes emerged in a series of joint hackathons, which were subsequently refined by JOINTLY interface designers and software developers before being integrated into a test environment, the "OER-Tool-Playground". In this test environment connected to the OER content buffet, OER multipliers tested software functions and gave feedback for further development. This resulted, for example, in solutions for metadata exchange, metadata generation and assistance systems for legal matters.

In order to support more complex networking and modification projects, open concepts were developed and offered for public use. Projects involving users as well as research and development should contribute to the whole. The JOINTLY team is in contact with various projects and organizes joint task forces as well as workshops to facilitate synergies and harmonizations.

The transfer of mature solutions into educational practice is already taking place. First, federal states and educational institutions are using the results or ideas inspired by these in cooperations. JOINTLY supports the transfer with webinars, a hotline and participation in various events, such as meetings of German university CIOs.

Guidelines for educational practice and decision-makers were developed in a total of seven subject areas. Seven task forces worked on these in a public process in autumn 2017 and presented summaries of their recommendations and conclusions at the OER Festival in Berlin later in 2017. The first version of the guidelines was published as a printed publication at the beginning of 2018. Individual task forces are currently working on details, pilot projects and enhancements.

## Target Groups
The target groups of the OERinfo projects are multipliers in the field of education, i.e. people who establish OER in their organisations.

As a cross-sectional project, JOINTLY does not address the target groups of the OERinfo projects but the projects and similar actors themselves. Thus, JOINTLY supports those who create the conditions for a successful transfer of OER into educational practice on the meta-level. In particular, these are experts in education and didactics, information technology and legal conditions:
* OER Projects and OER Actors
* federal and central state organisations that provide learning and media content distribution as well as IT infrastructures
* in schools: e.g. federal educational institutes, servers for education, school cloud projects
* in higher education institutions: e.g. federal e-learning organisations, centralised communication centres or non-commercial portals such as [eteaching.org](https://eteaching.org)
* OER grassroots actors, experienced teachers and other education experts
* Software development teams, particularly for learning environments, OER-enabling content management and authoring tools, OER portals, library systems. For the transfer of common concepts and solutions, JOINTLY addresses decision-makers at all levels.

## Scope of the project
In recent years, a large number of various initiatives and projects have emerged that enable, promote and support the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). Despite the heterogeneity and fragmentation of these different initiatives, the actors are united in their striving for a stronger implementation of OER in everyday education.

This is where JOINTLY has its place. The project supports multipliers in their cooperation and collaborative work. This is achieved, on the one hand, via events for knowledge sharing and construction and the collaborative development of ideas, solutions and OER. On the other hand, by the collaborative design and testing of IT tools and infrastructures that facilitate practical cooperation and, last but not least, by providing information on legal aspects of OER that are essential for successful cooperations.

Intensive discussions and collaborative development of concrete results will be supported. Simultaneously, specific knowledge is communicated, in particular on legal aspects, regarding how OER materials are produced in practice, and finally on tools and technologies that support OER.

Since technical aspects are crucial for the overall success of OER, experts will further develop infrastructures in open forms of cooperation, in particular presenting tools for collaborative work, easy reuse of available materials and adapting them adequately to the needs of stakeholders.

JOINTLY enables and supports cooperations on general tasks, prevents work being done twice or repeatedly, and strengthens the team spirit of a developing OER community.

The original runtime from 01.11.2016 to 30.04.2018 was extended by half a year. We are currently working on further consolidation.

## Results
JOINTLY are cooperating people and organizations, who developed, tested, improved and put concepts, materials and software into practice, in addition to their project goals. Countless presence and online meetings, asynchronous collaboration on documents and presentations to decision-makers are just some of the services provided by the community, supported, organized, supplemented and prepared by the JOINTLY team.

The [www.OER-Contentbuffet.info](https://www.OER-Contentbuffet.info) gathers results: Concepts, information summaries, materials, templates and software tools that can be reused for further OER transfer plans and adapted to specific target groups.

The OER tool playground is a testing laboratory for software tools that facilitate the creation, use and distribution of OER and other learning content. We have received feedback from users for further development. Mature results are provided by the OER content buffet.

The playground is currently under development to become a demonstration space for multipliers. It will enable them to demonstrate the benefits of these tools to their organisations. Project developers and patrons can find information on further investments.

Further transfer services include a series of brochures on legal aspects, OER production and guidelines for decision-makers.

In addition, JOINTLY has (further) developed cooperation formats. Besides various work formats, a number of leisure activities contributed to community building. For example, there was a competition between projects at the JOINTLY starter workshop for the best contribution to the culinary content buffet, and music was made by participants at most workshops. In this way, the OER song of the German OER community was composed and played in front of OER representatives from around 100 countries at the opening of the 2017 OER World Congress.

## Lessons learned
Collaboration on shared concepts, metaformats and software tools worked well, whereas working on shared OER qualification, awareness-raising materials and awareness raising activities could be improved. For example, collaborative analyses of target groups were used for the production of individual materials. On the other hand, workshops on collaborative material production have not been requested in this context.

This is where future initiatives could open up further potential. More concrete cooperation activities could be planned before the announcement of the calls for proposals, enabling projects to integrate them into their strategies and allowing for a cross-sectoral project to coordinate the concentration of resources and expertise. Considerable results could be a label for OER awareness, high-quality materials, shared advertising, text building blocks, media repositories and templates.

OER needs no additional IT-infrastructure, but existing systems should be upgraded to network and OER-enabled tools. Local search within an educational institution could suggest content from both local and relevant external sources using profile and context information and add it into the learning environment. Enhanced features should automatically check the content for license compatibility and generate the correct reference.

Successful community work: multipliers are expected to create their own material just as modernly and cooperatively as their audience is asked to learn it. This has been very successful on the one hand. For instance, the OER guidelines were developed in an open, step-by-step process.

On the other hand, it seems to be still difficult even for OER multipliers to provide source files of their materials. In addition to technical issues (e.g. for large movie files), the barriers of additional effort are hardly ever overcome.

## Outlook
The OER content buffet will be kept available for the next generation of OER multipliers. OERinfo plans to take over editorial services for the OER content buffet in autumn 2018. This will enable projects to receive support there as well, so that they can reuse materials and add their owns.

The guidelines communicated in the brochure "OER in Germany - Fields of Action 2018+" are currently discussed - we are promoting their implementation together with the community and continue developing recommendations for concrete concepts.

The playground is currently under development to become a demonstration space for multipliers. It will enable them to demonstrate the benefits of these tools to their organisations. Project developers and patrons can find information on further investments.

IT experts work together to implement IT infrastructure plans. Initial plans are already being implemented in individual projects. Initial interfaces for sharing OER are already being implemented for the first learning platforms. For further components, stakeholders raise funding together and strive for further joint projects.

## Figures and Illustrations
***Figure 1:** OER content buffet and its contents - results bundled out of various cooperations and projects*

***Figure 2:** Video on the next steps in IT*

***Figure 3:** Screenshot of the OER content buffet, shopping window of projects (30.05.2018)*

***Figure 4:** OER task forces formulated guidelines, which will be further concretized into concepts and solutions.*

***Figure 5:** OER-Tool-Playground as environment for experimenting, demonstrating and training including feedback. Here: Search using different sources - connectors are developed in software cooperations and are reusable.*

## Licence
:::info
**Text translated into English, original text available at:** JOINTLY (2018). In: *Projekte der BMBF-Förderung OERinfo 2017/2018. [Sonderband zum Fachmagazin Synergie](https://www.synergie.uni-hamburg.de/publikationen/sonderbaende/oer-info-2017-2018.html)*. Universität Hamburg, 2018, pp. 176--185.
**Translation by:** Anja Lorenz & Tom Konkol
**Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
:::

## Funding