The bwOER-CONNECT project aims to integrate the repositories for Open Educational Resources (OER) into the learning platforms to a greater extent than previously possible. The project focuses on the most widely used software products in Baden-Württemberg and throughout the German-speaking world: On the one hand, the OER repository software Edu-Sharing, which is used by the Baden-Württemberg OER repository ZOERR, for example, and on the other hand the learning platforms ILIAS and Moodle.

The vision behind this is to simplify both the publication of open educational resources and their integration into teaching in such a way that teachers can do this quickly, easily and conveniently from the learning platform.

Teachers generally make content for their courses available to their own students via the learning platform used at the respective university. Teachers should be able to publish the content under an OER license directly from their course on this learning platform with just a few clicks. At the same time, they should be able to add Open Educational Resources published by others directly from the repositories to their courses on the learning platform so that the content is always automatically kept up to date.

There are already various development approaches for both. Importing content from the repositories into the learning platforms has been possible for a number of years using plug-ins for ILIAS and Moodle, but has not yet found its way into the usual processes for providing learning content on the learning platforms. The export of content to edu-sharing repositories has not yet been fully operational, but there have been some new developments in this direction in recent years.

For both directions, the project analyzes the existing approaches and connects to the most promising ones in order to avoid duplication of work. The focus here is on concrete application scenarios for teachers on the one hand and editors at ZOERR on the other: it is not just a matter of further developing software that somehow makes transfer possible, but of further developing it in a way that actually simplifies the processes and is accepted by the users. In this context, particular importance is attached to feedback from users, partly in open discussions, but above all in usability tests.

With regard to ILIAS, the project builds on developments carried out by the ILIAS.nrw project. These developments are directly integrated into the ILIAS core and do not have to be retrofitted via plug-ins.

This common approach works like this: In ILIAS, content with OER licenses is collected by an integrated OER harvester and, after optional review by a local editor, moved to a public area. The metadata of the content in the public area is also made available via the open and standardized OER-PMH interface; it also contains a link to the content and a download link. This metadata can then be read by edu-sharing servers. They are used to generate an object in the Edu-Sharing repository, which can then be published in the repository after the content has been checked by the editors.

Together with the edu-sharing plug-in for ILIAS, which has been working for some time and allows the insertion of content from edu-sharing repositories in ILIAS courses, this enables a transfer in both directions and thus a comprehensive integration of the two services.

The project is funded by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts.
It is carried out jointly by the Tübingen University Library, the Computer Center of the University of Freiburg and the Heidelberg University Computer Center. There is close cooperation with the ILIAS.nrw project and the Moodle.nrw competence center.