Version Management in a Distributed Infrastructure for Open Educational Resources

Abstract

AbstractOne concern of Open Educational Resources (OER) is to establish infrastructures, such as repositories, where learning materials can be uploaded and exchanged. Various initiatives all over the world are currently investigating technical developments for finding and sharing OER in higher education. In this context, the consolidation of individual solutions in a distributed infrastructure must be considered. When creating and editing content, modifications and adjustments can result in new versions of a resource and further developments of other users can lead to derivatives. Managing versions in terms of tracking changes and learning about new versions available is not only an issue for OER repository development, but also for interaction and discoverability in a distributed infrastructure. Therefore, version management can be considered as an approach to potentially improve the reuse and revision OER. This contribution discusses use cases of OER in the context of version management and presents approaches to managing educational material in a distributed infrastructure resulting in a concept of version management for OER.