The BNE-OER project

The educational concept of “Education for Sustainable Development” (ESD) has become increasingly relevant to society in recent years. Since 2020, the new UNESCO programme “Education for Sustainable Development: Towards achieving the SDGs” (ESD 2030 for short) has also emphasised the central role of ESD in achieving the 2030 global sustainability agenda.              

Against this background, various digital learning units were developed as Open Educational Resources (OER) for university teaching at the University of Cologne, the University of Wuppertal and the South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences and published under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

You can also find a short description of the project in the teaser video (in German).

Aim of the project

The aim of the project is to qualify prospective teachers and educators to teach ESD-relevant content and issues and to teach them in extracurricular educational settings. In order to achieve this goal, various subject-specific and didactic competences are promoted in the digital learning units. In order to map the competences to be promoted, a competence structure model was developed, which serves as the basis for competence development. The competence structure model is available on the project website.

Structure of the digital learning units

Each digital learning unit takes approximately 90 minutes to complete and consists of a self-study unit and a complex application unit. In the self-study unit, various modules are used to impart knowledge (e.g. explanatory videos, presentations, diagrams), which are linked to exercises in order to directly repeat the newly acquired knowledge. The exercises are realised with H5P elements (e.g. cloze text, multiple choice, quiz questions, memory game). In this way, learners receive direct feedback on their learning success. Each learning unit also contains motivating, creative and open application tasks that can be used to consolidate the topic.

All learning units were evaluated in various courses on the basis of a developed evaluation form and revised on the basis of the results. The evaluation form (in German) is available on the project website.

Topics of the digital learning units

The digital learning units cover various topics relating to sustainable development from a scientific or didactic perspective. All 31 digital learning units created can be accessed on the project website.

Further information

The “BNE-OER” project is supported by the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) in the OERContent.NRW funding line.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version). The original text is the German version.