Offene Bildungsmaterialien als Ziel der Steuerung – Eine qualitative Inhaltsanalyse der OER-Policies deutscher Hochschulen im Kontext von Educational Governance

Open Educational Resources (OER), i.e. freely accessible teaching materials, are becoming increasingly relevant for teaching practice at universities. For universities as organisations, this raises the question of how the development and use of OER should be managed. One possibility is for universities to implement guidelines that university members must follow when using and developing OER. The term “OER policy” has been established for these guidelines. In the context of the educational governance approach, this article is dedicated to the spread of such OER policies in Germany and the policy impulses that are evident in these texts. Based on the websites of the 50 largest state universities in Germany, measured by the number of students, universities were identified that have implemented an explicit OER policy or an open access or open science policy with reference to OER. Nine universities remained, whose documents were examined by means of qualitative content analysis. The inductive analysis yielded six categories that help us understand the subject: publication channel, licences and format, quality assurance, service orientation, cooperation, and incentive systems. The study shows how open educational materials are conceptualised at an operational and strategic level and how OER become a topic of university governance.