Open Educational Resources in the TU Graz TeachCenter & beyond

Since November 2020, the policy on Open Educational Resources (available in German) (OER for short) has been applied at Graz University of Technology. The purpose of this guideline is to present TU Graz's OER policy for the promotion of open educational resources.

As a teacher at Graz University of Technology, you can mark your Open Educational Resources (OER) in the TeachCenter. In addition, as an OER-certified teacher, you can upload your openly licensed content in the TeachCenter to a library repository with the help of a plug-in developed especially for this purpose, thus making it even easier to share it with the general public via the library network.

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General information on OER

What are OER and what are their advantages for teachers?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are free educational resources that can be used, edited and redistributed free of charge. Their authors provide these contents with a corresponding license, which explicitly regulates the subsequent use.

OER are available in a variety of forms: as images, text, but also as video, as an entire course unit or as a printed book or script.

OER can have a positive impact on teaching and the boosting of one's own reputation, as the materials are improved through collaboration and best practice examples can be easily shared with others. At the same time, they lead to cost and time savings through the possibility of reuse. Ultimately, they promote an ideal that enables and encourages education through the use of freely available resources. From a legal point of view, teachers are safe with OER and do not expose themselves to any risk of copyright infringement. Ultimately, they set an example for the correct and sustainable handling of copyright and sources themselves.

More information on OER can be found in the TELucation article “OER - Open Educational Resources“

What do the different licenses mean and which one is the right one for me?

OER are often provided with a Creative Commons license

This infographic may be helpful in deciding on a license.

IMPORTANT Note: CC BY, and CC BY-SA (in the TeachCenter: CC - Creative Commons and CC - ShareAlike) are considered open licenses, as only then the further use and adaption are possible for other teachers. As far as possible, we recommend using one of these licenses for your teaching materials.

OER at TU Graz

Becoming an OER-certified teacher

Within the framework of the Open Education Austria Advanced project, Graz University of Technology is involved in developing an OER certification for university teachers at Austrian universities. As a teacher at Graz University of Technology, you can obtain an OER certificate that is valid throughout Austria by attending corresponding further training courses worth 1 ECTS credit.

The requirements for obtaining the certificate can be found in TU4U on the OER page or in the TELucation article on certification, which will be published in March 2022.

Certified individuals then have the option of uploading their openly licensed content to a library repository via a plugin in TeachCenter. The plugin is activated after the certificate is issued.

Highlighting OER in the TeachCenter as such

Documents can be assigned certain metadata when uploading them to the TeachCenter. Whenever a new file is loaded into a TeachCenter course, the licence All Rights Reserved is assigned. If you want your file to have a Creative Commons licence, you have to set this manually.

You have various options for labelling OER:

Adding an OER with the file upload - preferred option when using the OER plugin:

Activate the editing mode in your TeachCenter course (top right: Turn editing on).
Click on Add an Activity or Resource in the desired section. Select File from the pop-up menu and click Add.
Name the file. Click the small file icon in the Select Files section. A pop-up window for the file upload opens.

File symbol to select files — Fig. 1: File upload in the TeachCenter

By clicking on Choose File, you can select the desired file from your computer.
Then select the desired license in the Choose License section and confirm the upload by clicking on Upload this file.
Please note: The license names in the TeachCenter differ from the official names of the Creative Commons licenses.

Pop-up window: choose file and choose license from the drop-down menu — Fig. 2: Choosing a license

Click Save and return to course.

Adding a file with drag and drop

You can easily add files to your TeachCenter course by dragging and dropping them from the folder on your computer into the course while in edit mode. However, in this case, no file menu opens where you can select the license. Therefore, the license has to be added manually later.
Click on the small red gear symbol to the right of the file to open the activity settings.

Red gear next to the activity — Fig. 3: Open activity settings

In the section Select Files, you will see the file that you have loaded into the course by dragging and dropping it. Click on the file. A file menu will open.

Upload window where a file was uploaded — Fig. 4: Select a file

In the section Choose License, you can select the desired license and enter the author.
Please note: The license names in the TeachCenter differ from the official names of the Creative Commons licenses.

Edit a file and choose the license from a drop-down menu — Fig. 5: Choose a license subsequently

Please note: Licensing directly during file upload to TeachCenter works only for Office files, PDFs and images, but not for videos. How to license videos will be explained further later in this manual.

Please note: The license information set during file upload can only be viewed by those who have editing rights in the course and can modify the file, but the license can also be inserted directly in the file or in the description in the TeachCenter to make it visible to students, for example. How this works will be explained later.

Embedding the license information directly into the file

License information can be inserted directly into the file. In any case, the license must be stated and a link to the corresponding license must be provided. The Creative Commons website will guide you through this process and provide you with the appropriate license information, which you can copy and paste into your document.
In a video, you have the option to include this information in the credits.

Inserting the license information as description in the TeachCenter

In the TeachCenter, you also have the option of inserting the license information as a description of a file. To do so, click on the gear symbol to the right of a file when the editing mode is activated.

In the Description section, you can insert the license information as text and format it as desired. Don't forget to check the box Display description on course page so that your students can see the description later.

Edit a description in the TeachCenter and display description on course page — Fig. 7: Add a description

Students will see the following:

Student view of a file in the TC with a description — Fig. 8: File description is visible

For YouTube videos: Showing the license information on YouTube

If you post your videos on YouTube, you can set the license information in the video description.

Click Edit Video under your video.
In the basic settings, you can simply add license information as a description that will later appear below the video.

License in the description of a video under the tab "Basic" — Fig. 9: Add video description on YouTube

Under More Options, you can select the Creative Commons Attribution license instead of the standard YouTube license.

Tab "More options" and option to choose a license — Fig. 10: Add license under "More options"

Of course, you can also combine these options of marking the license (e.g. reference to the license directly in the file and additionally in the file settings in TeachCenter or reference to the license directly in the video credits as well as in the description).

Using the OER plugin

As soon as you are registered as an OER-certified teacher, you can use the OER plugin via the TeachCenter main menu.

TeachCenter main menu, button OER — Fig. 1: OER plugin in the main menu

All OER uploaded in TeachCenter are then uploaded to a library repository at regular intervals. The date of the next upload can be seen directly in the plugin. This makes it easier for other teachers to find your files. You can also search the files of other teachers in the repository.

Basic functions and metadata

All newly added files in your TeachCenter course are listed in the plug-in. You can see at a glance which information is still required for publication.

overview of the metadata of a document in the plugin — Fig. 3: Overview of metadata

Some metadata is automatically transferred from TeachCenter, e.g. file names, course metadata and licences. You can still change or add metadata directly in the plug-in by clicking on the gear symbol next to the file name. Important metadata are author, title of the document and licence.

title of a document and red gear symbol next to it — Fig. 4: Opening the metadata menu via file title

form to add metadata to an OER — Fig. 5: Adding metadata. Note that preferences cannot be overwritten here.

By ticking the item Marked for release, the file will be added to the library repository at the next upload date.

Using presets

If you often produce OER with similar metadata (e.g. always the same subject area, always the same licence), you also have the option of defining a preset that is automatically applied to all uploaded files. To do this, click on Preferences directly in the OER plug-in in the top right-hand corner.

Buttons Course Metadata, Preferences, Sorting and Card/List View — Fig. 6: Button "Preferences"

A menu opens in which you can define what should happen automatically to uploaded files.

menu to set preferences for all files — Fig. 7: Set preferences that apply to all files

To overwrite the default settings for individual files, click on the gear symbol next to the file name and click the button Disable Preferences for this file.