ID: 32293
At HAN University of Applied Sciences, we aim to create an ecosystem where students and educators have effortless access to high‑quality learning resources, open, semi‑open, and commercial, so they can assemble the optimal blend for their teaching and learning needs. At HAN, we believe that education should be accessible to everyone. In a time when it can sometimes be difficult to determine what is true and what is false, it is up to us to provide students with reliable information. Preferably through learning materials in various formats, so that students can choose the materials that suit them and enrich their studies. It’s also about using public resources wisely. Why keep reinventing the wheel? If we openly share and reuse the best materials, we gain in both quality and efficiency.Rather than positioning openness as a standalone objective, HAN has developed a institution‑wide approach that embeds Open Educational Resources (OER) into everyday practice. This approach is grounded in five pillars: support, professional development, recognition & rewards, change management, and technical infrastructure.1. Support. We provide hands‑on guidance to educators and teams as they search for, select, create, and share educational resources. We are setting up a Content Support Team (CST) to assist instructors and teams. This support covers educational, legal, aesthetic, and technical questions, allowing instructors to focus on the content itself. 2. Professional development. To strengthen OER literacy, we invest in targeted training programmes that help educators navigate copyright, Creative Commons licensing, accessibility requirements, and open pedagogical practices. To underpin this approach, we developed a competency profile for OER, grounded in existing frameworks and literature, as the foundation for our professionalisation programme. Modular workshops, e-learning, coaching trajectories, and learning communities build confidence and enable sustainable adoption. 3. Recognition and rewards. OER creation and sharing often remain invisible forms of academic labor. At HAN, we address this by recognizing contributions to open knowledge within workload models, team goals, and performance dialogues. Faculty who develop openly licensed materials, improve existing resources, or experiment with open pedagogy receive acknowledgment consistent with the broader recognition and rewards movement in higher education.4. Change management. To achieve openness on a larger scale, cultural, structural, and behavioral changes are necessary. That is why we are adopting a structured approach to change management to align leadership, foster faculty engagement, dispel misconceptions about open licenses, and establish a clear governance framework. Managers are coached in this process as part of the change initiative. The faculties develop their own implementation plans, ensuring that their chosen approach fits within the existing challenges within the faculty. 5. Technical infrastructure. Finally, a sustainable OER ecosystem depends on robust, architecture-aware technology. HAN strives to create an integrated environment in which faculty and students can discover, combine, and reuse materials from various repositories and platforms. We prioritize a single HAN learning materials repository where all learning materials are stored, from which quality checks can be performed, and from which they can then be easily shared openly.
