Federal Library of Open Educational Resources – FREE
The federal digital library aims at coping with the scarcity of open and high-quality educational resources by offering access to public collections created by and for educators.
Duration: March 2022 – December 2024
Status: Completed
Educational Level: Lower Secondary Level, Upper Secondary Level – Vocational Education, Upper Secondary Level – Grammar School Education, Tertiary Level
Topic: Digital Tools
Keywords: Learning Platforms
Initial Situation
The FREE project complements the Swiss Digital Skills Academy (d-skills.ch), a national initiative involving 13 academic institutions—including EPFL and PHBern—that supports teachers in their digital transformation. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a critical shortage of open, high-quality educational content and revealed society’s digital precarity. Existing educational platforms are numerous, but they often fail to offer accessible, federated, and open repositories adapted to classroom and remote learning needs. FREE addresses this gap by proposing a federal digital library of OERs, supported by the Graasp.org platform developed at EPFL. This infrastructure empowers educators to co-create and share resources—from simple media to complex interactive capsules—supporting innovative and blended learning scenarios across Switzerland without replacing existing cantonal repositories.
Objectives
The FREE project aimed to design, implement, and validate a Federal Library of Open Educational Resources (OERs) integrated into the Graasp.org platform. It sought to create a sustainable, user-friendly infrastructure that supports all educational stakeholders. A central goal was to empower teachers to co-create, adapt, and openly share high-quality digital resources, thereby fostering a culture of collaboration, openness, and digital competence development in Swiss education.
Method
The project followed a design thinking approach with educators, trainers, and researchers from PHBern. It started with an empathy phase using hands-on activities to assess user needs, followed by iterative ideation, prototyping, and validation. Feedback was collected via questionnaires, interviews, and usage data. The project was structured in three phases (2022–2024): initial design and prototyping; user evaluation and refinement; and large-scale dissemination, training, and research. Participatory design and empirical validation underpinned the development of a sustainable infrastructure for OERs.
Results
By February 2023, a publicly accessible prototype of the digital library (library.graasp.org) was implemented. A joint evaluation with PHBern confirmed its usability. The platform allowed users to find, create, and publish educational content with embedded learning analytics. Evaluations showed that teachers valued improved searchability and usability features. Issues such as clarity around public vs. private sharing and Creative Commons licensing were identified and addressed in subsequent platform updates.
Implemented Translation
In 2022, teacher trainers and trainees at PHBern evaluated the first prototype. Their feedback led to updated features in 2023, including improved usability, social engagement tools like «Most liked» and «Recently created» collections, and clearer processes for sharing and publishing under CC licenses. The platform now better supports teachers in creating and distributing open educational content. FREE benefits teachers, trainers, and students, as well as higher education institutions including the 13 partners in the Swiss Digital Skills project. It offers a scalable, federated infrastructure for sharing OERs nationally. The project has supported digital transformation in Swiss education by enhancing access to high-quality, open educational resources and by fostering a culture of co-creation and sharing among educators.
