Adding Assets to the OER World Map for Open Education Week

The dots started appearing on the OER World Map in 2014 as an innovative effort to chart the people, projects, organizations, services, tools, events and policies that make up the world of open education. The map was a project based in Germany operated by hbz and graphthinking GmbH in cooperation with the Open University (UK).

For a period of time the OER World Map faded from the web but fortunately has been brought back through funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and is being further developed by OERinfo and Intevation GmbH.

Whether you were aware of or contributed to the map before or are brand new to it, we are excited to be working with the map makers during the 2025 Open Education Week to add many more dots to the countries represented (green below) and ideally to help bring in the countries not represented (white) onto the map.

Contribute to adding more information to OER World Map for Open Education Week 2025

Just by creating an account on the OER World Map, you are supporting the effort. We are asking OE Week participants to first add themselves to the map as part of the network of people, associate themselves with their institution (and add the institution if it does not exist), associate themselves with Open Education Global and Open Education Week, AND, ideally put an open education project, event, service, or policy onto the map.

How much can we do between now and the end of March? That’s up to you.

Login in to or create an account on the OER World Map

Visit the OER World Map and look for the Login menu link on the top bar. If you previously had created an account, see if you can log in (you may need to recover a password). However, most people will be new, so click the Register button in the bottom.

Once logged in new users are asked to create their profiles; if you had a previously created account, to edit your information, look under the Me menu and select Profile. Click the pencil icon to edit.

Complete as many of the profile items as possible (most importantly include the location information at least country and city so it can be mapped), you can always return later to refine. Towards the bottom look for the button Show More Fields for Person– and there are many fields! The important ones to pay attention to now include:

  • Attending: Start typing Open Education Week 2025 and when the event appears below, select it. You have just associated yourself with OE Week 2025.
  • Member of: Here is where you can associate yourself with your institution or organization. Start typing it’s name, and select if it appears. If not listed, we can skip for now as you can later take on the worthy task of adding it to the map.

For now, save your profile. But you have already made important improvements to the OER World Map. Return to the main map via the OER World Map link in the top menu bar or go directly there.

First search for yourself! See if there is a dot that represents the country where you are located, and hover over the dot to see if you appear as a Person. Click to see how you are represented on the map.

Next, search for Open Education Week 2025. Because it is associated with Open Education Global, which has an office address in the USA, it shows up over the United States (note how mapping global organizations is a challenge!). Click the event dot to open its entry or go directly there from this link.

You should see your name listed under People Attending. If not look athe top of the page for the I’m Attending button to click.

Doing these steps will help us and the OER World Map staff know how many people we were able to engage with during Open Education Week.

This is just the beginning! Take some time to explore the OER World Map to understand how it is structured, and the many ways to locate information. You may notice that it’s very much like a wiki. If you find an organization or project you are familiar with, you can improve it’s entry by editing its map data.

There’s more to learn next, how to add new information.

Add Open Assets to the OER World Map

As noted above, in just creating your OER World Map account and associating yourself with Open Education Week 2025, you have made a contribution to it as a network of colleagues.

But we hope you are interested in adding more, that is the purpose we see in asking OEWeek25 participants to add to the map (which actually is the database underneath). Are you ready and willing?

What is mapped includes OERs but actually more. We advise reviewing the different types of data you can add to the map. When logged in hover over the Add item in the top menu. After some time exploring and navigating the map, you might understand how these are interconnected.

The types of information you may consider adding to the OER World Map.

For more help on using the OER World Map, please refer to its general Frequently Asked Questions and for adding/entering new information, the Editors FAQ is very helpful, especially on explaining the types of information it collects.

In many ways, the OER World Map is very wiki like- if you find information that is not updated or that you can augment with more information, you can edit any record in the map.

We hope the open education community can make significant additions to the OER World Map. You can ask questions or share your experiences in the OEWeek space of OEG Connect. You can also learn more from Susanne Grimm’s OEG Connect August 2024 post on the OER World Map’s developments as well as a Wednesdays Demo Live webcast Susanne provided in October 2024

Open Asset Sharing for 2025

About the OE Week Asset Collection

Explore what has been shared for OE Week

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