Siemens Stiftung Media Portal: OER for STEM lessons

Whether school is taking place in the classroom or online, the Media Portal supports teachers and students with over 4,300 open educational resources (OER) for all types of schools and grade levels. The offering comprises a wide selection of practice-oriented teaching materials, from images, worksheets, and videos to experiments and interactive exercises, as well as complete packages on various topics. The materials are free, quality-checked, and modifiable.

Many media on the Media Portal work very well for distance learning. Thanks to the ability to filter the media by grade, subject, and keywords, teachers and students can quickly find suitable materials for the STEM subjects for both teaching and self-learning. Teachers can compile the materials into bookmark lists and very easily share these lists electronically with their colleagues, students, or the parents. The student’s area also offers interactive learning media with experiments, puzzles, and instructional videos. The materials are available in English, German, and Spanish.

The materials focus on the topics of health, energy, and the environment. New media packages with teaching guidelines are added periodically; these packages can be used as the basis for preparing entire teaching units or individual lessons. The “Big data,” “Artificial intelligence,” and “Algorithms in our everyday lives” media packages have been published recently.

The teaching materials on the Media Portal are available under the open CC BY-SA 4.0 international license. They may therefore be legally modified, augmented with one’s own content, and shared.

High-quality STEM education for everyone

Siemens Stiftung is dedicated to providing free and open access to high-quality STEM education to more people around the world. The Media Portal for STEM teaching has been purely an OER portal since May 2018; in addition to providing the more than 4,300 media, this portal offers digital training and educational information on teaching methods such as inquiry-based learning, design thinking, service learning, and inclusive learning. The media packages link the STEM topics with value-related issues, thus contributing to value formation in science and technology teaching.

The decision to make the Media Portal an open education platform was greatly influenced by the educational-didactic potential of OER: Classrooms are becoming more diverse, groups of students more heterogeneous – making it all the more important to give teachers the ability to simply and legally adapt available materials to their students’ individual learning needs and potential.