From Vision to Impact: A Change Approach Toward Accessible Digital Educational Resources

How do you move from promoting Open Educational Resources (OER) to making openness part of everyday educational practice?

At HAN University of Applied Sciences, we are building an institution-wide ecosystem in which educators and students can easily discover, select, create, reuse and share high-quality learning resources—open, semi-open and commercial. Our approach starts from a simple principle: openness is not a goal in itself, but a means to improve the quality, accessibility and efficiency of education and to make better use of public resources.

Rather than treating OER as an isolated project, HAN has embedded it in five interconnected pillars: support, professional development, recognition and rewards, change management, and technical infrastructure.

We provide practical support for educators through a Content Support Team, invest in OER competencies and professional learning, and work to make open educational contributions visible and valued. At the same time, faculties develop their own approaches to change, supported by leadership and a shared governance framework. Finally, we are developing an integrated technical environment that enables educators and students to discover, combine, reuse and openly share learning materials.

In this session, we will share HAN’s approach, the lessons learned so far, and the challenges of turning OER from an individual practice into an institution-wide ecosystem. We will explore what it takes to connect people, pedagogy, organisational change and technology to make openness sustainable.