When we started setting up a portal for Open Educational Resources at universities in Lower Saxony in 2019, now known as twillo.de, we were not the first in Germany to embark on such a project. At the same time, state-wide repositories in the higher education sector were also set up and disseminated in other federal states. A centralised platform could have saved resources here, but the approach of distributed repositories offers greater potential for innovation through the possibility of testing different approaches and lightweight further development. It was clear from the outset that the repositories still needed to be merged so that teachers and students would not end up having to search numerous sources in parallel. For this reason, we started building a central OER search index for distributed and heterogeneous OER repositories in 2020, which has since then been publicly available at oersi.org.
As it turned out that searching through a much larger amount of materials in OERSI was much more convenient and performant than searching in our own repository itself, we decided to develop a plugin for WordPress with which we could integrate the search functionality of OERSI into the twillo homepage. OERSI offers the option of submitting queries via an open API and receiving the metadata. This solution has shown that the approach of integrating the search into websites is also becoming increasingly interesting for other providers of OER platforms as well, as the configurability of the plugin also allows specific parts of materials to be preselected. For example, a university of education can limit itself to the subjects of the teacher training programme, a technical university to the selection of engineering and natural sciences subjects or to the restriction of regional offerings or selected languages. Compared to other metasearch engines, this approach offers the possibility of making cross-regional, multilingual and international content available on your own website.
Due to the open design of this overall architecture as an open service and with open source components in combination with compact tutorials on the use and integration of GitHub and GitLab for the provision of OER, complete solutions can be implemented in the shortest possible time using simple means, even for smaller institutions without a large infrastructure, with minimum costs and maximum results. The overall system offers a pragmatic approach to an infrastructure for finding and publishing Open Educational Resources that is already available worldwide today.
Now that the success of this overall approach has been demonstrated in the context of Open Educational Resources, we are currently working on a possible subsequent use of the components for other areas of Open Science, e.g. to make open data or course information from university alliances from distributed sources findable in the same way and, in the case of data, to point out an easy way for sharing and collaboration.
Included in
[Session 10B]: Digital CapabilityReferencesOERSI https://oersi.org/ twillo https://www.twillo.de/ Plugin https://gitlab.com/TIBHannover/oer/wordpress-oersi-plugin Tutorials https://oersi.org/resources?search=%22github+oer+tutorial%22 Metadata Form https://oersi.gitlab.io/metadata-form/metadata-generator.html
Author KeywordsDistributed Repositories, Search Index, WordPress Integration, Tutorials, OERSI
