Benefits and challenges in the context of Open Educational Resources
12-02, 15:45–16:45 (Europe/Berlin), Stage 1, Leibniz-Saal, BBAW

The distribution of Open Educational Resources (OER) is strongly connected to the rise of the world wide web.


Access to teaching and learning materials completely changed since everyone from everywhere in the world could easily share and reuse educational resources via internet. With our four panelists (Sushumna Rao Tadinada | Robert Schuwer | Susanne Grimm | Jöran Muuß-Merholz) we will discuss benefits and challenges in the context of OER and talk about their lessons learned.

Sushumna is an OER practitioner and advocate. She developed the OE4BW Course (Creating Interactive
Content in Moodle) and founded the H5pCatalogue, to offer an opportunity to teachers to repurpose OER and publish Interactive content. In addition, she is a Moodle Certified Educator - Providing consultation services for e-content development and Moodle administration.
Currently Sushumna is associated with Ethiraj College For Women (Chennai India) as a LMS advisor and associated with MERLOT-SkillsCommons H5P Initiative as Senior Instructional Designer. She conducted hundred plus National Workshops and Training sessions on EdTech tools and technologies and volunteered as an EdTech Trainer for KBR and HL Foundation Faculty Trainings and workshops.

Robert Schuwer is Professor of Open Educational Resources (OER) at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, School of ICT in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In September 2016 he was appointed Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair on OER at Fontys. Since 2006 the majority of his work is about OER and Open Education. Among other activities, he was project leader in the Wikiwijs program, aiming at enhancing awareness on OER and creating a national infrastructure for OER, initiated by the Dutch Ministry of Education. Currently, he is the captain of the track “Towards digital (open) resources” in the Dutch Acceleration Plan for Innovating Higher Education using Information Technology. His current research is on enhancing adoption of OER and other forms of open online education by the early and late majority of teachers.

Susanne Grimm is a research associate at the the Education Information Center (IZB), DIPF. As editor at the German Education Server, she is responsible for the continued operation of OERinfo, the information center OER. From 2017 to 2021 she worked as a research assistant at the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) involved in the development of the OERinfo portal as a transfer partner for the field of vocational training. She studied Multilingual Communication (B.A.) at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences and Sustainable Development Cooperation (M.A.) at the TU Kaiserslautern.

Jöran Muuß-Merholz holds a master in educational management. In 2009 Jöran started his agency “J&K - Jöran und Konsorten” (“Jöran and fellows”) to strengthen the connections between the educational and the digital world.

Jöran is consulting educational organizations on how to use digital media in their work. He is writing articles both for specialized press and consumer press and sometimes for academic journals too. He is giving lectures and running workshops mostly in German-spoken countries but as well in Boston, Brno, Tokyo or Stockholm. More on Jöran’s publications, events and projects can be found on https://www.joeran.de/