OERlabs: Empathy first, solution later?

Abstract

[EN] The project ‘OERlabs - jointly training student (teachers) for Open Eductional Resources (OER) use’ is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research Germany (BMBF[SH1] ) and aims to sensitize and contextualize OER for all relevant university actors by strategically carrying out an open developmental process. This process includes organizing regular Multi-Stakeholder[SH2] Dialogues (MSD) over the course of the project. This paper briefly outlines the kick-off MSD event, its methodological approach in context of the entire process, i.e. building a base for working on solutions with implicit use of OER-principles and presents the participants feedback and provides results from the event. In contrast to committee work, our MSD-approach provides participants with more spacefor open discussions while still working towards a shared goal. In the context of OER, these events show the importance of focusing on the participants attitudes and mindset, rather than confronting them with general OER-related topics right away, such as licensing and creative commons. The project OERlabs will organize its final MSD in July of 2018, while also documenting additional experiences in an Open Book.