The eScouts project at Ruhr-University Bochum develops a proceeding to open teaching and learning. It is formed by student employees of the central learning technology service and dedicated to try out new practices and technologies at the university.

The eScouts are trained by a special online education module and supervised and guided by staff members.

The incorporation and integration of students into the central E-Learning service has been since 2007 an important feature of its work.

The eScouts set up an understanding of open content which means at a basic level to provide open and free access to the learning content. If possible licensing as OER should be applied. Goals for opening education include making learning content visible, giving insight for new students, fostering diversity and offering an alternative to copyright restrictions. It was seen as an important part of the project to have arguments to convince staff to open teaching and learning.

This includes building an online open education repository, creating OpenCourseWare after the model of MIT OpenCourseware and offering training sessions. The Open RUB repository (www.open.rub.de) includes 30 items of freely accessible learning content and OER: mainly information courses, lecture recordings, selfstudy and OCW courses.
The project with the repository at its heart is going to be further developed as well as structures, attitudes, skills and knowledge regarding OER.

Keywords

OCW · OER · open · OpenCourseWare