The gathering for everyone committed to free and open education
Below you will find the English version of the German ‚About us‘ page for the OERcamp. The event OERcamp is a meeting place for practitioners of digital and open teaching and learning materials in German-speaking countries. Topic of the OERcamps is Open Educational Resources (OER), understood as teaching and learning materials under free and open licenses. The first OERcamp took place in Bremen in 2012. To date, there have been 44 OERcamp events held in various cities across Germany and online. Each camp has up to 300 participants from all areas of education.
OERcamps open up new and contemporary learning formats based on openness, sharing, participation and equality. They are the appropriate educational format for a time in which we are not only dependent on transferring fixed knowledge, but also on creating new knowledge together. OERcamps are also about sharing, discussing and negotiating solutions in a changing world.They are also a central building block for networking within the framework of the OER strategy of the BMBF/BMBFSFJ (Federal Ministry of Education and Research; The Federal Ministry for Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth).
The camps are also a source for the joint development and use of OER. Sessions are also documented using collaborative text documents, blogs, podcasts, etc., which are usually shared under a CC BY license. Since the beginning, hundreds of documents have been created and countless OER activities have been created, initiated, promoted, catalyzed and pursued.
OERcamps – mainstreaming open education through barcamps
OERcamps offer a radical “open to all” approach by lowering the barriers to participation. This is done by removing participation fees and all formal requirements and by encouraging cross-educational collaboration and peer-to-peer support for participants. The OERcamps provide a base and center for the growing German OER community.
At the heart of the OERcamps is the “unconference” format of the Barcamps. In recent years, the OERcamps have grown to more than 10 events per year in various formats. There is also a barcamp book and a collection of CC BY-licensed materials created by a community of OER actors. Even a series of webtalks, educational videos and a virtual SummOERschool have been created to support educators in times of Covid-19.
The OERcamps were funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research from 2017 to March 2024 under grant numbers 01PO18025 and 01P023002. From 2024 to 2028, they receive funding from the Federal Ministry for Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth under grant number 01PO2400.
Facts and figures about the OERcamps
- 1105 sessions and 396 workshops, including presentations
- over 7,284 registrations
- 100+ published outcomes
- a wide range of materials available on our OERcamp materials page (primarily in German)
- 300 videos produced on our OERcamp YouTube channel (primarily in German)
Press materials (in German)
The OERcamp is always open for questions, further content, interviews etc.!
Insights to the events
The following videos provide insights into the events, formats, and topics of the OERcamp community. They show what exchange, collaboration, and open educational practices actually look like at OERcamps.
Germany's OER strategy, the UNESCO recommendation on OER and OERcamp
OERcamp is committed to the OER strategy of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (German: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) from 2022 and the UNESCO recommendation on OER from 2019 in its orientation for the years 2024 to 2028. OERcamp sees itself as a host for impulses and discussions on the design of education in general and Open Education, OER and OEP in particular, in the sense of the fields of action described in the OER strategy and the action areas listed in the UNESCO recommendation.
- Establish and build up OER expertise among educational professionals
- Develop new collaborations: from OER to Open Educational Practices (OEP)
- Establish technical foundations and structures for OER and OEP
- Support innovation and cross-learning-location education with OER
- Support OER with user-centred, application-oriented and networked research
- Implementation: bring together initiatives and stakeholders in digitally supported OER practice
- Building capacity of stakeholders to create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute OER
- Developing supportive policy
- Encouraging effective, inclusive and equitable access to quality OER
- Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER
- Promoting and reinforcing international cooperation
OERcamp — Awards and mentions
The work of OERcamp has received international recognition on several occasions. In 2020, OERcamp received the Open Innovation Award for Excellence from Open Education Global. It was also cited in the EDUCAUSE Horizon Report as an example of an open education incubator. A UNESCO report on OER activities in Germany also describes the Barcamp format as an important contribution to the development of a strong OER community.
The event OERcamp is delighted to have received the special distinction of the Open Innovation Award 2020, which was presented by the OE Awards Committee “Open Education Global”.
Statement of the OE Award Committee:
“The Open Innovation Award for Excellence is presented to an outstanding innovation that brings a new approach to open education. Ideas or solutions that present innovative applications of OER to create new opportunities or address existing challenges in open education. This award is selected by the OE Awards Committee to recognize truly exceptional work in Open Education. We applaud your dedication to openness, access, high quality and innovation, shown by your work and vision.”
The work of OERcamps has been acknowledged by 2020 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition, p. 27:
„To encourage and support such initiatives, countries such as Germany have developed the #OERcamp, which serves as an incubator through informal meetups across the country.“
A review of OER-related activities in Germany on behalf of UNESCO (Orr, Neumann, Muuß-Merholz 2017, S. 8) stated:
„Since OER activities are mostly driven bottom-up, there has been a need for sharing questions, experiences and materials between players, who have been isolated in their own institutions. These players found opportunities for sharing in cross-sector events and communities. Especially the barcamp/unconference format turned out to fit tremendously well developing a strong German OER community.“
What exactly is a Barcamp?
Barcamp—is there a bar here? No, usually not. The name comes from the digital scene: The open “Barcamp” emerged as an alternative to the invitation-only “Foo Camp.” “Foo” and “Bar” are often used as placeholder terms in programming when the specific content is still undecided. This fits well with the Barcamp concept: The framework of the event is set, but the topics are determined by the participants themselves.
A Barcamp is therefore not a traditional conference with a fixed program. The program is created collaboratively at the start of the event. Participants propose sessions: These can be discussions, short presentations, questions, exchanges of experiences, or collaborative work sessions. Afterward, everyone chooses which sessions they’d like to attend.
At OERcamp, we use Barcamps because the format is particularly well-suited to Open Educational Resources. It’s all about openness, participation, sharing, and collaborative development. People contribute their knowledge, learn from one another, and work together to further develop ideas or materials.
If you’d like to learn more about Barcamps or organize one yourself, you’ll find plenty of free resources at selbstlernen.net: guides, checklists, templates, podcast episodes, and the freely available Barcamp book.
