Printing the OER World Map: “OER Atlas 2017”

Today at the OERde 17 Festival we publish the second edition of the “OER Atlas”. The “OER Atlas 2017” is a printed book with 152 pages, which documents OER activities from Germany, Austria and Switzerland: more than 100 services and nearly 50 projects.

The OERde 17 Festival is a major German OER event which takes place in Berlin (27.11.-29.11.2017). The festival consists of several events, starting with a barcamp, followed by an expert forum. The highlight of the festival was the OERde17 Awards yesterday, which recognized established OER initiatives as well as promising newcomers.

Though a printed book might seem somewhat anachronistic, we assumed that there are many people – especially within the field of policy making – who still prefer print. In addition to this a printed book documents the state of the movement at the publishing date so you can have a look and compare the numbers from the different editions to see the development of OER in the three German speaking countries. The number of activities and organisations shown in the “OER Atlas 2017” has increased in nearly every field for more than 40% comparing to the “OER Atlas 2016“.

The Atlas includes the “Ljubljana UNESCO OER Action Plan” translated to German and the German summary of the: “German OER Practices and Policy – from Bottom-up to Top-down Initiatives” written by Dominic Orr, Jan Neumann und Jöran Muuß-Merholz. An excerpt from this text gives a short overview on the OERinfo Förderprogramm and another excerpt discusses the German OER movement in numbers.

The second edition of the “OER Atlas” wasn’t generated manually like the first version. We used the json export to extract the information about services, projects and organisations form the OER World Map. The json data were converted to xml to generate the tables for the PDF. This was not yet done completely automatical, but we are on a good way to this aim.

We believe that it would be a great feature for the OER World Map to provide printed reports on the state of the OER movement in every country of the world pressing just one button. If and when we will develop this feature is not yet clear. But it would be very helpful to see other countries start collecting OER related material using the OER World Map in a systematic way. In case you are planning to do something like this, please let us know – we are very happy to share our experiences.

Here you can download a PDF version of the “OER Atlas 2017”.

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