Learning, developing an disseminating inclusion and digitisation in OER contexts

In September 2021, the digital portal for teaching and learning in North Rhine-Westphalia, ORCA.nrw ("Open Resources Campus NRW") was officially launched. ORCA provides quality-proofed materials for digitally supported teaching and learning at universities. In various funding lines of NRW and in cooperation with the institution Digitale Hochschule NRW, learning content is created as an Open Educational Resource (OER for short). These can be found, accessed, downloaded, used, modified and uploaded again in a new version on ORCA.nrw in the sense of 5v (cf. Hilton & Wiley 2018). In terms of ORCA's objectives, the aim in the future is to use the teaching/learning materials provided in a wide variety of granularity (modularised) in university teaching. The materials available on ORCA are not conceived as a static "cupboard of materials“ but are understood as a contribution to a new culture of teaching and learning, which can also be described as a "culture of sharing" in learning communities (cf. Otto 2019; Müller 2022). Both a didactical and an empirical foundation of Open Educational Practice (OEP) are a desideratum so far. well as an empirical foundation of Open Educational Practice (OEP) have so far been a desideratum.

The vision of transformative university teaching with open educational resources aims to be concretised by the consortium project "InDigO" for the area "Inclusion in Teacher Education" (LABG 2021). InDigO is funded by the MKW NRW as a pilot project for two years with approximately one million euros.

In this project, the subject of educational science in the disciplines of primary education and special needs education is exemplarily investigated, how teachers can integrate freely accessible educational resources of the platform ORCA.nrw in their inclusion-oriented teaching in a variety of ways. The pilot project includes seven universities in NRW to test and evaluate how OER materials can be used, disseminated, further developed and curricularly anchored within the framework of internal and cross-university learning communities for the promotion of inclusion-related competences of teacher students. The pilot concept is characterised by a coherence of content (inclusion, digitalisation, participation), innovative media didactics (teaching and learning in the Open Educational Practice format) and technology (technical infrastructure as an enabling and connecting element). Within the scope of an explorative, design- and development-oriented research approach (Kamin & Meister 2017), the project will provide fundamental, transferable insights into the conditions for success regarding a new "culture of sharing" of digital resources by lecturers in so-called learning communities. The aim is also to achieve a sustainable contribution towards profiling ORCA's content in the field of inclusion. In this way, the modules of different granularity (from the didactic concept of use and associated teaching/learning materials for accompanied teaching/learning processes in face-to-face and online teaching all the way to self-learning modules) tested and evaluated in the project as well as the tried out concepts of community learning are made available for further use.