Open Educational Resources (OER) became a promising topic for a range of educational problems. Addressing educational inequalities between North and South as well as between rich and poor or enriching the quality of teaching are a few of them. In the last years a range of OER projects have been realized but the broad everyday OER practice in learning and teaching is still a vision. While recent discussions focus on individual OER objects or technological, legal and financial dimensions we would like to open the view on OER and move OER reference infrastructures (like referatories) to the fore.

The World OER Congress held at UNESCO recommends that states facilitate “finding, retrieving and sharing of OER” (UNESCO 2012). Further a recent study in higher education in the US indicates that the time and effort to find and evaluate OER is a key barrier for OER use (Allan, Seaman 2014, 27). The study proposes a centralized search and reference system as a suitable solution for this problem. Therefore, aspects of OER will be focused in this symposium, which are often out of scope: the need to align and stabilize OER infrastructures to diverse educational systems, actors and practices. A core challenge for Europe is: offering an aggregated access point to a multitude of resources while addressing the challenge of heterogeneity of the educational systems in the European countries.

In this symposium we want to exchange about this emerging landscape of - open – reference infrastructures for teachers and learners in the European countries with the aim to find possibilities to connect ongoing projects on a European scale. Next to educational researchers we would like to involve developers and practitioners for a broad view but focused discussion.

The following questions will lead through the symposium:  What kinds of specific reference infrastructures are realized or planned to address local educational systems in European countries or on European level? What could be a European perspective on OER while taking the diversity of educational systems into account? Is there a chance for a decentralized networked European infrastructure or ends this inevitable in one centralized top down solution?

Allen, I. Elaine; Seaman, Jeff (2014): Opening the Curriculum: Open Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2014. Pearson. URL http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/openingthecurriculum2014.pdf (last visit 30.01.2015) UNESCO (2012): 2012 Paris OER Declaration. The World OER Congress held at UNESCO, Paris on 20-22 June 2012. URL http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/Events/Paris%20OER%20Declaration_01.pdf (last visit 30.01.2015)