By
Sigrid Hartong, Ina Sander
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: hier lesen
Over the past months, the ETH-TECH team has been diving into our first big work package. Led by University of Padua and Babeș-Bolyai University, the team conducted a broad analysis of higher education syllabi, investigating to what extent ethical and critical perspectives on technology, data and AI are already present. In addition, we organized Awareness Raising Sessions with faculty members and students in all four countries, discussing the syllabi as well as people’s practices around tech and ethics.
In the meantime, we at HSU are slowly getting ready for taking over from our colleagues in Italy and Romania to lead the next big work package, which is the development of Open Education Resources (OERs) to support ethical data and AI usage in higher education. During the work package, the team from the University of Padua will serve as our co-leader, and we look very much forward to partnering with the Italian team for this endeavour!
Over the past years, our research in the field of datafication, technology and education has included the investigation of OERs (see, for instance, Ina’s dissertation on online resources for fostering critical datafication literacy). Moreover, in different projects such as the UNBLACK THE BOX initiative or SMASCH, we ourselves developed OERs for teachers and other educational practitioners. On the one side, we hereby frequently experienced how challenging it is to develop a “good OER”, that is, an OER that is not only presenting knowledge (e.g., from critical data studies), but that is truly usable in the everyday life of practitioners. Particularly this “making useful” of OERs – specifically of those that are less oriented towards “easy knowledge” or “quick-how-to-guides”, but rather towards pausing, reflection and critical experimenting – is where we still see a long road ahead in our field. On the other hand, we acknowledge how much colleagues in the field have already developed over the past years, how much fun it is to dive into critical data literacy OERs out there, and to draw inspiration from these OERs for our own work.
When we met with our ETH-TECH partners in Padua in the beginning of 2025, we invited all of them to bring their favourite OER to the meeting and explain to us what they liked about it. After each presentation, we intensively discussed which OER features were regarded particularly inspiring, and why. Here are some snapshots from the session:
- The Italian partners showed this Data Management Expert Guide: https://dmeg.cessda.eu/Data-Management-Expert-Guide/5.-Protect/Ethics-and-data-protection. We agreed that the guide is particularly helpful because it provides concrete templates for students on how to deal with data ethics. Furthermore, the structure of the OER is very easy to navigate, with different “layers” of content that can be made (in)visible, with information structured in “digestible bits” and bullet points. However, we also discussed that the OER was only available in one language. Regarding the rather plain layout (black-white, few graphical elements), we saw a pro in accessibility and also loading time (when there is bad internet connection), but still wondered if the design could be made visually more appealing.
- The Spanish team presented three OER highlights: the Data Detox Kit (https://datadetoxkit.org/en/home/), The Glass Room (https://theglassroom.org/supercharged-by-ai/) and the OER We Need to Talk, AI (https://weneedtotalk.ai/). They reported that their students love to use the resources and that it was particularly the interactive and graphical elements (i.e., not only reading texts), which engaged them. We agreed that aesthetics should matter much more in OERs, but also that PDFs (such as the We Need to Talk-OER) might be useful because they can be used offline and printed. We also discussed how much the complexity of the OERs (i.e., how much content should they cover) matters both for usage and production, and that we need to carefully consider which focus to set in the ETH-TECH OERs.
- The team from Romania showed the PROMIS OER (https://promis.education/) which they themselves had developed in one of their previous projects. Different from the other OERs, PROMIS offers a whole course environment, in which students learn about social inclusion matters in a gamified (e.g., assignments that need to be passed), chapter-structured approach. We agreed that this OER was much more technically advanced than what we are able to develop in ETH-TECH, but that particularly the idea of including “use cases” in the form of assignments was highly inspirational. We further controversially discussed gamification as a fruitful way to engage students, while at the same time entailing a thin line between external gratification and internal motivation.
- Lastly, we from the German team presented the EdTechReflector (https://unblackthebox.org/en/materials-outputs/the-edtechreflector/) and the SMASCH Labcademy (https://moodle.smasch.eu) as two OERs we had developed in different projects over the past years. Here, the group found interactive elements with avatars who explained edtech dilemmas to users (as “Piet the pragmatic” in the Labcademy) very useful, particularly when explaining rather complex issues. Similarly, the “turning boxes”-design of the EdTechReflector, which combines interactivity and flexibility (which boxes users choose to click) with reflection, was seen as very inspiring.
The session was concluded by a brainstorm on things to consider, and which workflow to establish, when diving into our own OER development, which seeks to bring together input from five different partners across four countries.
After the meeting in Padua, we at HSU continued brainstorming and preparing next steps for the OER development. In particular, and drawing on our teaching experience from the last years, we decided to include students as much as possible in the design of the OERs, and we took first steps in that direction.
There is no doubt that an exciting journey lies ahead of us. We will keep you posted here in the stories and hope you stay tuned!
The HSU team
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