The OER-CODEX project aimed to enhance the capacity of higher education teachers to design, facilitate, and assess Online Collaborative Learning (OCL) by leveraging Open Educational Resources (OER). Its objectives were to develop a transferable methodology for embedding OCL into digital and blended teaching formats and to provide modular, DigCompEdu-aligned training courses focused on 21st-century skills, learner engagement, and inclusive pedagogy. The courses aimed to strengthen digital pedagogy competencies, including the use of accessible and assistive technologies, formative assessment, learning analytics, and immersive tools such as gamification and VR. OCL was promoted as a cross-disciplinary strategy to foster collaborative problem-solving and digital competencies, in line with OECD frameworks. A key objective was to establish a sustainable approach to co-creation: participants not only gained skills but also contributed collaboratively created OER. These resources now form a reusable pool of examples and templates that can be adapted across disciplines and languages. This dual outcome—capacity building and open content production—supports the long-term digital transformation of higher education institutions.
The OER-CODEX project was initiated in response to the pressing need for systematic support in enhancing the digital and pedagogical capacities of higher education teachers. The COVID-19 crisis highlighted significant gaps in digital readiness and exposed challenges in adopting effective online and blended learning approaches—especially at the pedagogical level. While educators expressed strong willingness to adopt blended formats and Online Collaborative Learning (OCL) to teach 21st-century skills, they lacked the necessary expertise, confidence, and accessible content to do so effectively. The project aimed to address these needs by developing a structured methodology and a set of ten modular, open-access OER courses aligned with the DigCompEdu framework. These courses were designed to build educators' digital competences, with a particular focus on peer collaboration, formative assessment, and reflective learning. To further support sustainable adoption, participating educators applied their learning by creating OER materials during piloting, contributing to a growing, practice-based repository that remains openly accessible for adaptation and reuse at institutional, national, and international levels—ensuring long-term impact.