Open Education Austria is a project of four Austrian universities to jointly develop a national infrastructure for Open Educational Resources (OER). For the first time, an attempt is being made to link services of e-learning centers, central IT services and libraries of the partner universities in order to support teachers in creating OER materials for self-study and teaching. The project aims to achieve a gradual increase in the quality of teaching and learning and the visibility of good practice materials within the professional community.

Objectives: The project supports university teachers in the design and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). Initially, the focus was particularly on the admission procedures in the study fields of Life Sciences & MINT. However, due to the great interdisciplinary interest, the activities were expanded and now cover a wide field of academic teaching. In addition to the development of support services for teachers, the accessibility of these materials for university teaching and learning in Austria is to be ensured. In the project, an exemplary subject portal will be implemented, in which open educational resources can be found that teachers have stored and released in one of the connected archive systems according to the owner principle. These materials are then available for further development and multiple use in self-study and teaching and contribute to a gradual increase in the quality of teaching and learning.

Open Education Austria is a Higher Education Area Structural Funds project approved by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research in June 2016 and ran until December 2018.

The project site is now being continued by the follow-up project "Open Education Austria Advanced" from March 2020 to February 2024: https://www.openeducation.at/