Open educational resources are the future of teaching at Swiss universities. The first libraries and teaching staff are making their educational resources freely available to everyone on the new 'Switch OER' exchange platform. What do they hope to gain from this?
Melanie Germann is a lecturer at the FHNW School of Social Work. She has developed various digital method sets to support students in practice for her specialised course 'Practical Training'. During the specialised course, she makes the open educational resources available to the practical trainers (PTs) via Moodle. Once the specialised course is completed, the PTs' access to Moodle also expires. 'As a lecturer, I then receive desperate e-mails asking whether and how they still have access to the rich and attractive methods for supporting students in practice. And now, at last, these great materials can be uploaded to the Switch OER repository and accessed, edited and jointly developed by everyone. We are all delighted: the lecturers, the PTs and the students.'
University libraries often go to great lengths to ensure that photos and graphics from textbooks can be reused. The added value of OER for them lies above all in the labour and cost savings in licencing issues.
Lecturers benefit from the opportunity to share their own resources and reuse educational materials from other lecturers. This allows them to create new courses with much less effort than if they had to develop everything by themselves. This not only saves them valuable time, but also gives them new impetus to diversify their teaching methods, ultimately improving the quality of teaching for everyone.
Universities as institutions also benefit: Switch OER is an open door for them to help shape the further development of the Swiss Education Area. They position themselves as innovative education providers and strengthen their brand in teaching.
Finally, Switch OER means freedom and flexibility for students. High-quality open educational resources are available to them anytime and anywhere. This allows them to customise the learning process to their individual needs.
OER not only promote teaching and learning. They also improve the performance of the Swiss Education Area. OER are an important component of open science and open education programmes that are established at universities.
They are one of the digitalisation topics that swissuniversities supports financially.
OER play an significant role at federal level. The fourth objective for universities in the ERI Dispatch 2025 - 2028 states that universities participate in digital platforms for open science and education.
The Switch OER platform also supports the UN's fourth Sustainable Development Goal of ensuring inclusive, equitable and quality education.
Geert Hoevenaars, Product Portfolio Manager at Switch, puts it succinctly: ‘Switch OER follows the principle of Open Educational Resources: to share knowledge and to make it freely accessible without licence barriers.’
Universities impart more than just knowledge. They also pave the way for innovative education and strengthen dialogue within the academic community. In this way, you position your institution as a pioneer in the Swiss Education Area.
