The shift to remote learning and remote teaching has proven to be both a huge challenge and possibility for open educational practices on different levels. More strikingly than ever, the discourse about online learning has been shaped by commercial ed-tech providers with a wide range of regular and exceptional busines models attracting the interest of individual teachers, schools and increasingly parents as private customers. This situation made the potential of open educational practices evident in terms of availability and scalability (Huang 2020). At the same time, low threshold learning materials and instructional design skills remain marginal in the pedagogical practice and the formation of future teachers. This talk will focus on the role of open-source software in the production of reusable learning objects (RLO) as part of a bigger skill set for creative empowerment in teacher education in Germany.

This presentation is based on the introduction of basic instructional design methods in a project-based course about game-based learning (see: https://d-3.germanistik.uni-halle.de/2021/04/gbl-seminar/). The one term course for university students was structured around the production of gamified or game-based learning objects for German language or literature classes. Loosely based on principles of creative instructional design methods (Clinton/Hokanson 2011) students gained the methodological skill set and technological experience of agile product development needed for the production of interactive learning content. In order to familiarize the students with concrete technological solutions for gameful learning design settings, the seminar was accompanied by a three hours online-workshop to introduce H5P as a low-entry open-source learning technology.

During the students’ work on their individual group projects several aspects of open-source technologies became evident on different levels: Based on the distinction of gratis, open and free models of educational content (see Suber 2019) the interoperability and reusability of the resulting learning objects was a key learning. At the same time, the various degrees of complexity of H5P allowed for a step-by-step introduction to workflows of instructional design as a driver of open educational practices. On this basis, the talk seeks to discuss the potentials of implicitly or explicitly addressing features of open-source learning technologies to empower students’ own productivity and creativity in the design of interactive learning content. It thereby seeks to share experiences about the relevance of familiarizing future educators with OEP not only from a content-perspective but as well from the perspective of open frameworks and software.