Is your summer a bit quieter than usual? Colleagues out of office, inboxes slow to fill – and somehow you’ve found yourself buried in teaching materials anyway, prepping slides, handouts, or exercises for the next semester?
If that sounds familiar, we’d like to introduce you to something that might change how you think about that work: Open Educational Resources (OER).
OER stands for Open Educational Resources – teaching and learning materials that are freely available for anyone to use, adapt, and share. By lecturers and teachers, for lecturers and teachers! It’s a global movement spanning nearly every subject and discipline. Take a look at the (https://oerworldmap.org) to get a sense of its scale, all built around one simple idea: high-quality learning resources should be accessible to educators and students alike, not locked away behind paywalls or buried in a single professor’s hard drive.
KlimaOER: OER for Climate Science and Meteorology
Closer to home, the KlimaOER initiative – coordinated by Ellen Arimond at the University of Bonn (UB) and supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung, Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (BMBFSFJ) – brings the OER philosophy specifically to climate science and meteorology. Ellen and her team offer workshops and guidelines for anyone who’s ever built a great lecture or exercise and thought, “it’s a shame this just lives on my laptop.”
Note: So far, all the guides are only available in German. The team plans to translate everything into English by next year at the latest and publish the English versions on the same webpage.
There’s a bigger picture here too. Together with partners at the University of Cologne and Hamburg, and KIT, the University of Bonn is exploring how initiatives like KlimaOER can help address a real problem in our field: high dropout rates in meteorology degree programs, and the challenge of attracting new students in the first place. Sharing well-made, openly licensed materials – through seminar series, shared repositories, or simple cross-institutional collaboration – is one concrete way we can support that goal.
We’ve already been in touch with Ellen about KlimaOER, and we’re happy to make an introduction if you’re curious.
But first – a question for you: do you know of other OER platforms or initiatives, in meteorology or beyond, that you’ve found useful? Whether you’ve published materials, remixed someone else’s, or simply stumbled across a great resource, we’d love to hear about it in the comments or reach out directly. The more of us compare notes, the better this all works.
