OERlabs Openbook/Higher education between researching and designing (Design Principles)

What remains of the OERlabs? A question like this inevitably arises in project-oriented research when the beginning and end of a project are determined by time limits (critical Zierer, 2011) and the field in the current constellation must also be left again. Thus, after the end of the project, the personal memories of the OERlabs and the experiences made in connection with the various activities (cf. epilogue Reinmann in Dürnberger/Hofhues/Sporer, 2011), but also the one or other newly established connections remain. In addition, we assume that the 'spirit of the OERlabs' lives on at the respective universities and beyond: dialogical formats have already been copied and reused elsewhere (#mixingpossible); student participation was perceived as helpful and not as permanently critical; (media) laboratories were physically initiated if they were lacking in organization, to name just a few examples.

In a practice and development project that aims to sensitize individual actors in higher education and teacher training and ultimately to cultural change ("Change", Walter & Riegler, 2016) in schools and universities, the examples mentioned are already considerable successes. However, they manifest themselves less in (externally) visible structures and can be summarised under the headings of communication and phenomenal networking. Because we have been in dialogue with many actors in teacher education and all media- and teaching-related institutions in various forms (from dialogue formats and open lab formats to the social web in Twitter and Podcast) for over a year and a half, we now know comparatively exactly where the shoe pinches. It also became clear that the actual challenges in cooperation lie behind the phenomena currently under discussion: it is not (only) about OER, but (also) about questions of cooperative teaching development. In such cases, we have encouraged actors to become active themselves or to join forces and form so-called OERhubs as nodes. Because expertise is available in many places in the organisations, it "only" has to be disclosed and bundled.

We see OERhubs as nodes in the network of those actors who were involved in the OERlabs or who joined forces in a network-like form on the basis of thematically similar ideas and interests. OERhubs are currently virtual hubs that can change. The approach of the project allows actors to seek decentralised problem solutions themselves and to institutionalise their hubs in this way.

In this way, a central principle can be extracted which in our opinion is helpful for the research and design of schools and universities: With the OERlabs, we have made an attempt not to start from the (qualification or competence) deficits of the actors, but to address their individual knowledge and skills as well as their subjective attitudes as essential for the design of schools or universities. In our application for funding it says:

However, it is not so much the handling of OER as an information resource or educational material that students or lecturers need to learn. In our opinion, the joint creation and dissemination/processing of OER is more challenging for those involved: Our OER-related courses reveal, among other things, how well or poorly students, lecturers or teachers can cooperate, how much or little they know about media and in particular media technology and media law issues, and that media are rarely seen as part of a didactic arrangement, but rather as "add-ons" to motivate or activate learners, etc. (...)

Accordingly, we do not assume that teacher training students, teachers or multipliers lack a specific design competence for OER; instead, we use the experience and knowledge or action resources to quickly become effective in the OERlabs and to successively transfer OER-related findings into existing or new training and further education programmes beyond the end of the project.

The pedagogical principle of empowerment goes hand in hand with inspiring the actors above all for their own actions or offering them a possibility for (systematic) reflection in their own actions (cf. Den Ouden in Dürnberger/Hofhues/Sporer 2011). This seems particularly appropriate for dealing with current phenomena and the media, as the actors are encountered at eye level. Both the way in which we meet in the OERlabs and the goal of networking for cooperative or collaborative problem-solving find anchor points and correspondences in the research literature. Our focus is not only on the experiences of each participant in the OERlabs, but also on the organisation and specific forms of organisation within and between traditional ideas of organisation (on relational university development see Hofhues, Pensel & Möller, 2018).

In this respect, the OERlabs, with their anchoring in two (media-)pedagogically/didactically oriented professorships, make it clear that, on the one hand, the transfer of scientific findings into practice through reflection and communication is possible and, on the other hand, research can also take place in development projects. Without our own understanding of research as co-design (cf. Hofhues et al., i.Dr.) this path would be difficult to follow. From our perspective, the principles of action of the OERlabs also address the specifics of the educational organisations school and university: the importance of adaptive-evolutionary innovations has been discussed here for years (Altrichter et al.; 1st synergy contribution by OERlabs). We are therefore not interested in implementing a trend topic or a technical innovation per se, or a technical innovation that bypasses people's needs, but rather in addressing social innovations by adopting certain (communication and action) practices. Those changes are visible and we can anecdotally report about them. How (higher) school practice will present itself in the further course would have to be researched more closely with reconstructive procedures of empirical social research (reference You(r) Study).

So do we complete the project and move out of the field by closing the doors of the OERlabs in their specific project form? Or do we take the field metaphor seriously and have first cultivated the field to cultivate it together and to see how the seeds grow because we have been able to consider various possibilities of arable farming and social space design? So do the results of a project have to be available by the end of the project or is sustainability only apparent when something can be created? The perspectives on this vary depending on the perspective on a project, on research as (one's own) work within a knowledge-based organisation, on the contribution of research to shaping practice or on the skills that we have (further) developed in the course of such a project. So nobody could have guessed in the run-up to the project how important, for example, an appealing and pleasant catering offer would become for all participants (see MSD Cologne) or why we were repeatedly exposed as a fan community (see MSD Cologne). What might present itself with a smile to readers, projects the project reality into OpenBook and makes it possible that we necessarily have to get away from it. After all, we only want to deal with bee sting during breaks and otherwise rather think about questions of (media) education.

That's also why it's fitting to close the OpenBook with an image that has been circulating in the project for a long time and fits the lab metaphor: With the OERlabs we have stirred up all sorts of topics and potential new projects under the carpet of digital media and the (formal) organisation of education (cf. blog post patchwork carpet OER). Research and design are therefore inextricably linked, even beyond the OERlabs.

That's also why it's a good idea to close the OpenBook with a picture that we've already touched on above: With the OERlabs we have discovered all sorts of topics and potential new projects in the wide corridor of the university organization, which otherwise tend to grow wild. What has become visible, however, is that continuous observation of the field is needed, that communication and the design of experiential spaces function like a fertilizer - research and design are therefore inseparably linked, even beyond the OERlabs.