Sharing Knowledge Advances the Discipline and Profession of Social Work

In this chapter, we show how the COVID-19 pandemic inspired two universities to cooperate to develop an open educational resources (OERs) platform to increase the quality of their educational materials and gain more time for individualized educational processes. Individualized and personalized curricula are in vogue, but they are elaborate, complex, demanding, and require taking a different approach to knowledge. Cooperation is one way to meet these challenges. Educational resources on specific topics are developed by teams of experts from across universities instead of by individual lecturers and are made available to everyone via an online platform. These are revised at regular intervals to reflect the feedback received. OERs have created a new paradigm of sharing and developing educational materials, which is significant for educational transformation. In this case study, OERs are promoted in highly complex forms of cooperation between social work departments at Swiss universities. We show how individuals can take bottom–up, top–down, and transversal approaches to driving their ideas forward and bringing different players together.