SURF and higher education institutions reach agreement on Edusources service

With VU and EUR taking a leading role, SURF, the education and research institutions’ IT network organisation, has realised an agreement on offering Edusources as a new service with the various higher education institutions involved. Edusources will be available from January 2021.

Availability of online teaching materials is an important success factor in offering flexible and personalised education and is due to the current COVID-19 situation, possibly more important than ever.

Innovating teaching materials
One of the advantages of the repository is that it enables lecturers to innovate their ways of education easily. They can access an abundance of digital teaching materials and resources for use and reuse, and can, where necessary, adapt and readapt these to their own educational context, so that these can be offered within their own modules.

Canvas integration and options
It is also important that digital (open) teaching materials can be linked easily to educational modules in Canvas; the university’s LMS. Edusources provides a good infrastructure, with a meta data function, a search function enabling teaching materials to be found easily and, of course, good integration with Canvas.

The major advantage for lecturers is being able to select from three scenarios. The teaching materials can be offered 1) as closed access resources for their own target group, 2) within Erasmus University (semi-open), and 3) as completely open access resources.