It is easy to become overwhelmed when you want to start to engage with Open Educational Resources (OER) and open education. A useful first step is to consider a few concrete examples of OER and see how they are being used in teaching.

On this page, we showcase a number of OER made at the University of Groningen, other higher education institutions in the Netherlands, and international institutions. Some of these OER were designed by teachers for themselves and others to use in their teaching, some are meant to illustrate or visualize topics relevant for specific subjects, and some are inputs for or outcomes of open pedagogical assessments. As such, this list highlights some, but not all, ways you can engage with OER. Through these links to specific OER, you can work backwards to visit the websites where these OER are posted, and where you can find additional examples. If you are interested in broader collections, you can find a number of OER repositories and search engines in our guideline on searching and evaluating OER.

If you are inspired by the examples in this list and wish to know more about the topic of OER and open education, you can read more about the OER support services at the UG on our webpage, or reach out to us at: oer-library@rug.nl.

University of Groningen OER
 

• Introduction to Academic Research
  
  This CC-BY-NC-SA licensed open textbook/reader was created by dr. Sander van Lanen at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences. The reader itself was created by compiling chapters from three other open textbooks, and tackles important topics for doing academic research in the domain of spatial sciences. It is also a resource that is in constant flux, as students have the opportunity during the course to comment on the text, and dr. van Lanen plans to continuously update the content based on their suggestions.
   

• Biopsychology Signature Project: Website 1 and 2, & Syllabus
  
  For his Biopsychology course at the University College Groningen, dr. Chris May embraced the transformative potential of open education, and designed his Signature Project assignment. Instead of a classic exam or writing assignment, he asked groups of students to create a webpage on any topic they thought interesting, to provide a biopsychological perspective on it, and to create active learning exercises for visitors of the page to more actively engage with the topic. The resulting webpages are bundled on one website as an OER with a CC-BY-NC-SA license, and the course syllabus describing the Signature Project has also been shared openly using the same license. He has repeated this design this year, and created a new website with new topics as well!

• ​Julia Data Science
  
  This CC-BY-NC-SA open textbook is the result of an international collaboration between dr. José Storópoli of the Universidade Nove de Julho in Brazil, PhD student Rik Huijzer of the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, and dr. Lázaro Alonso of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The texbook, available both as PDF and in an online version with the source code, describes the basics of the Julia programming languages DataFrames.jl and Makie.jl for data manipulation and visualization, and makes the case for why it may be useful to use Julia instead of R or Python.

• Law syllabi on International Disputes, Dissidence in Leadership, and Human Rights
  
  In the role of course coordinator, dr. Mando Rachovitsa realized that the course structure of the courses he coordinated may be useful for other teachers and staff that want to design/teach law courses. He has since openly shared three syllabi using a CC-BY license that outline in detail the course objectives, literature and assessment types for each course. Linked here are the syllabi for the LLM course Settlement of International Disputes taught at the Faculty of Law (given together with prof. Marcel Brus, Marlies Hesselman LLM, and prof. Panos Merkouris), the Honours College Masterclass Dissidence in Leadership: "What would Bert Röling do?", and the University College Groningen Capstone course The Age of Human Rights.

• Open Educational Resources Videos - Chemical/Laboratory Techniques (Playlist and files)
  
  Dr. Niek Eisink and dr. Tjalling Canrinus know the value of refreshing your knowledge on fundamental techniques. To that extent, they created a number of OER videos on key chemical and laboratory techniques, and shared these with the world via the University of Groningen's YouTube. These CC-BY-NC-SA  videos can be used by teachers in their teaching to help illustrate their explanations of these fundamental techniques, by students who are working on their assignments and research in the actual university labs as additional support, and by professionals in companies and institutions to quickly refresh themselves on the basic techniques essential to chemistry. By being on a public platform, everybody can use these techniques without fail, and by sharing the videos via Edusources, enthusiastic users can even create new versions of the videos. More OER videos from other fields to come!

OER from other Dutch institutions

• Japanese Cities: Critical Infrastructure Design for Extreme Resilience
  
  This CC-BY-NC-SA OER, created by Eunice Koid, Claudia Rot, Martine Rutten, and other experts from both the TU Delft and other Dutch institutions, is a great example of how in-depth, broad, and multi-modal OER can be, and how a platform such as Edusources can be used to create intricate nested collections of open materials. This specific OER is the main landing page that outlines a number of case studies examining the concept of urban resilience in Japan. The case studies are ordered around 8 thematic foci, and through this webpage you can click through to each specific thematic focus and the relevant cases and materials for the topic. These materials include lectures, reports, videos and slideshows.

• Online Training in Business Model Innovation for SMEs in the EU
  
  Prof. Timber Haaker of the Saxion University of Applied Sciences, and prof. Harry Bouwman and dr. Mark de Reuver of the TU Delft created a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on business model innovation for small- and medium-sized enterprises. This course is available on the MOOC platform edX, and although the course itself is free, to receive certification, you need to pay. The link here lead to general Edusources page, from where you can be redirected to the announcement of the MOOC on the TU Delft website. However, by clicking through to the individual lesson Edusources pages from the main page, and opening the materials from there, you will reach the TU Delft OpenCourseWare pages for the individual lessons, where you can find all lectures and materials, licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA.

• RElastiCity: an Urban Resilience Game
  
  OER come in different shapes and sizes, and this includes educational games. This CC-BY-NC-SA urban resilience game created by the TU Delft GameLab/dr. Geertje Bekebrede, Gracia Bovenberg-Murris, Linda van Veen and dr. Carissa Champlin gives students an interactive playground to test how decision-making strategies can make a city better at adapting to (sudden) stresses and allow for urban growth. There are tons of materials and manuals available, and the creators even provide templates for students and educators to create their own custom materials to add to the game.

• Computational Thinking
  
  An analytical mindset and the ability to manipulate information and data is central to higher educational success. This CC-BY-NC-SA OER collection on computational thinking and programming using the open source software Python, created by dr. Aniel Bhulai of the Free University (VU) in Amsterdam, is a great resource to help build these skills. The collection contains both an open online textbook on Python programming, and a series of videos on programming, algorithms, mathematical proof and solution strategies. This collection is useful both for students of in STEM fields, and people more broadly interested in understanding scientific, analytical thinking.

• Castles in Great Britain
  
  OER from Dutch origins are not only found on search engines such as Edusources, but can also be uploaded to Wikiwijs, where the format allows for direct interactions with the material. This makes it a great platform for providing ancillary material. This CC-BY OER on Castles in Great Britain is exactly that. Frank Scholten created this short, multi-faceted lesson, which includes multimedia, active learning questions, background information, and homework for students. Therefore, this material highlights the strengths that come with the often digital nature of OER.

• Environmental Toxicology
  
  The creation of OER can be a small, individual project, but educators can also work together to create a top-of-the-line OER. Indeed, the decentralized nature of open materials can make it easy for individual contributors to quickly share their work on a project, and allows for many insights to come together to create a new product. This CC-BY licensed open textbook on Environmental Toxicology shows this. Editors and authors from among others the University of Amsterdam, Free University, Open University, Radboud University, Wageningen University, Utrecht University, Leiden University, and Hasselt University came together to create this comprehensive textbook, which has been written in a modular fashion so that individual sections can be used on their own, and contains tools for self-study.

• Student-created blogs on propaganda and populism in the Roman world
  
  OER can also be created by students to help deepen their own understanding of certain topics. At the Radboud University (RU), the history teachers dr. Miriam Groen-Vallinga and dr. Ketty Iannantuono teamed up with librarian Monique Schoutsen to create a CC-BY licensed digital collection composed of ten student-created blogs. In these blogs, they explore how populism and propaganda were present in the Roman world. A great example of open pedagogy, showcasing the insights of students and giving them a platform to present their knowledge to a broader audience.

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International OER

• Gapminder
  
  The ability to think critically and to challenge your own assumptions is a key skill that students at university want and need to engage in for their studies. This CC-BY-NC OER website created by the Swedish non-profit Gapminder provides useful tools to help visualize and test your own and students' assumptions regarding many societal topics. The Worldview Upgrader tool allows you to quiz yourself about a ton of statistics, the Animating Data graph tool allows you to create thought-provoking figures that bring to light the complex relations between global statistics, and the Dollar Street tool gives you a real look behind what these global statistics and discrepancies between nations mean.

• Open Syllabus Galaxy Plot
  
  Meta-materials that describe courses can also be shared as OER, and this Galaxy Plot of the Open Syllabus project is a nice example of how such meta-materials can help educators guide their decisions regarding what literature to assign to students. Furthermore, it allows educators to explore readings related to their field, and can provide concrete suggestions on how to expand on angles previously underexplored in courses. It is important to remember that the plot does not directly link to the syllabi listed, and the materials in the plot are not necessarily open themselves, so for those educators interested in switching to OER in their courses, this plot may be limited in its usefulness.

• ArcGIS Story Maps (Teacher and Student)
  
  OER can enable new forms of assessments that challenge students to engage with educational materials more actively, and the outcomes of such assessments may be shared with the world as OER as well. One interesting assessment type that educators could explore is challenging students to create a Story Map using the ArcGIS website: a gradually unfolding web-based narrative using data, maps, and images. It is free to create a public account (with limited options) for noncommercial and nongovernmental purposes. Here, we link to two example story maps, a (CC-BY-NC-SA licensed) one created by dr. Bonnie Huskins of the University of New Brunswick detailing the journeys of a number of British loyalists during the American Revolutionary War, and one created by a student of the University of Edinburgh that shows how the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 points out some of the spatial inequalities present in London.

• Science Websites by Non-Science Majors
  
  Over time, open pedagogical projects can lead to a large number of OER. The linked website (CC-BY licensed) here showcases the outcomes of the CORE 101 Open Pedagogy Project led by dr. Heather Miceli at Roger Williams University. During the CORE 101 course, dr. Miceli challenges her often non-science major students to pick a science topic and describe it in an accessible, scientific manner on a webpage. These webpages are then archived on the linked website, where others can visit them. Furthermore, as part of the project, students in later cohorts can also opt to add to the existing webpages rather than creating a new one, constantly improving and updating these OER with the latest insights.