In recent years, the potentials of Open Educational Resources (OER) for teaching and learning have been widely discussed. An OER can be characterized as a learning resource used in educational settings, which is openly licensed, mostly digital, and can be modified. While the topic OER is already ubiquitous, the mainstream use of OER in educational everyday life is less realized. On an infrastructural level Repositories of OER (ROER) are regarded as means to foster the awareness of OER (McGreal et. al. 2013), whereby a broad range of quality indicators have been investigated (Atenas & Havemann 2014). By limiting the design space of infrastructures to repositories, important potentials of OER fall out of scope that could be realized by: A common access point (e.g. search interface) to the whole stock of OER and transparency between different repositories (Conole & Alevizou, 2010). Further main potentials for OER usage in educational practices are the infrastructural integration of the OER life cycle (see Orr et al. 2015; Fulantelli et al. 2008) and their modification according to the 5R (Wiley 2014) to align to specific educational settings.

An OECD study (Hylén et al. 2012) left the impression that Germany is way behind to address the potentials of OER. But NGOs created a variety of initiatives and public educational servers operate on the federal state level, whereby on the national level the referatory ELIXIER collects OER references (Dobusch et al. 2015). To advance the political OER agenda on the national level the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funded in 2015 two studies: Mapping OER, which focuses on quality, legal, business, and professional aspects and a feasibility study concerning the infrastructural level. The paper bases on the feasibility study, which comprehends requirements for an OER infrastructure in respect of specific needs of the four educational sectors: school education, higher education, and vocational and continuing education considered together. A specific focus lies on the realization of a national trans-sectorial infrastructure balancing the potentials of repositories and referatories of OER. 

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