Fostering AI & recognition in Open Education (fAIr)

The project aims to advance Open Educational Resources (OER) by pursuing two interconnected goals: digital skills for generating OER should be supported by AI, and community-based metrics should be developed to further establish a culture of sharing.

Key data

Description

“fAIr – fostering AI & recognition in Open Education”, which is part of the larger initiative “Swiss Digital Skills Academy 2025” (SDSA 2025) co-funded by swissuniversities, aims to significantly advance the creation and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) at the higher education level.
By pursuing the advancement of OER, fAIr aligns with the guiding principles of Open Science and contributes to the implementation of both the OER-Policy of the ZHAW and the ZHAW digital transformation strategy. Ultimately, the fAIr project aims to actively support efforts to make the "culture of sharing" an everyday reality. It does so by focusing on two key ideas: First, the complexity and time required to create OER should be significantly reduced by using AI-supported methods to foster digital skills related to reuse, remixing, and publishing OER teaching materials. Additionally, incentives should be created for higher education institutions and educators to develop these digital competencies.
To achieve this, two concrete and interconnected objectives are being pursued:

First, an AI assistant for generating and reusing OER will be developed in collaboration with selected educators and subject matter experts.
Second, the project aims to examine which metrics could be meaningful and enriching in making high-quality teaching and OER more visible.

With the help of the AI assistant, specific skills such as finding, remixing and creating digital, open educational content (digital content creation) and communicating in a digital environment will be developed. Furthermore, accessibility to the materials will be explicitly addressed, ensuring that legal aspects (CC licenses) and accessibility requirements are taken into account. The AI assistant will be linked to the national repository "Switch OER" (https://oer.switch.ch/) and made freely available to users worldwide.

The second objective will be pursued by first publishing a feasibility study in the form of a White Paper. In this document, the team will explore the potential development of quantitative and qualitative metrics for OER. Metrics and standards serve to make OER and openness in teaching a measurable aspect of evaluating higher education teaching performance. They provide a strong incentive for higher education institutions and educators to engage in Open Education and open higher education teaching and to develop sustainable digital competencies related to Open Educational Practices. Ideally, these metrics should provide insights both at the institutional level and for individual authors or specific OER materials.

Once the current situation has been mapped and discussed in the White Paper, the project will move further and search for concrete indicators that can support OER-creators in their task. The aim is to identify a series of indicators and propose a way to put them in practice. The results of this second phase will also be made public at the end of the project.