What’s of interest? OERSI- Open Educational Resources Search Index
Tell me more!
a search engine for free educational materials in higher education. As a central search entry point, OERSI connects OER repositories of distributed state initiatives, institutional repositories of universities and libraries, and subject-specialized repositories for OER.
OERSI has been developed since the beginning of 2020 as a jointly initiated project by the Hochschulbibliothekszentrum des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (hbz) and the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) as an open source-based service. In summer 2020, the service was launched for the first time as a public beta version and was transferred to productive operation in spring 2021.
No content is stored in OERSI itself, only the metadata is merged and homogenized for uniform searching. The OERSI data structure is developed cooperatively within the Allgemeines Metadatenprofil für Bildungsressourcen (AMB). Compared to repositories, it is not possible to upload materials in OERSI itself. Materials are made available through the connected sources.
This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.
This came across my radar via Mastodon on the announcement that OERSI now indexes the entire Pressbooks Directory (as well as titles from OpenStax)
I’ve often recommended for OER search metasearch/federated sites like the Mason OER Metafinder and OASIS, but with just some brief play, I’d suggest strongly using the advanced search features in OERSI and note that the site offers access in German, Dutch, English, and Ukraniane (!!).
OERSI indicates it indexes (today) 75904 OERs. It’s the filters on the left side that make it powerful:
Academic Subject (multilevel)
Type (video, course, textbook, presentation, worksheet,. etc)
License (you know, CC flavors)
Author (search or browse)
Organization (to filter by universities, etc)
Language (From Arabic to Vietnamese and many more in between)
Provider (here is where I can see MIT COurseware, Pressbooks Directory, and many other repositories)
Hi Alan, thanks for tagging OERSI here in OE Global Connect. Just to mention another interesting feature, that I presented last year in Nantes: we implemented a keyword mapping in 7+ languages based on Wikidata to find similar resources in different languages. So for example, if you search for „climate change“ you will get the same results as if you search for „Klimawandel“ (german), and can decide later on in which target language you are looking for content by the language filter on the left. This feature is also implemented as Open Source to be reused in other contexts OER Search Index / internationalization-tool · GitLab
