OE Global 2019

In a crowded ecosystem of OER creators and adapters, there are often different teams working on quite similar projects but unaware of each other. To a funding entity this represents an opportunity for potential savings, by supporting only one team per topic, or consolidating (perhaps virtually) the teams to get the product more quickly and cheaply.

Even to the independent practitioners who may inadvertently be working on a project overlapping other practitioners' efforts, this could be a opportunity to share the labor, ideas, and inspiration, or to see what another team is doing because that knowledge allows you to work more purposefully with your own, different approach.

The problem is one of coordination. Since the open ed community neither has nor wants a coordinating overseer, we are building a platform which makes easy the sharing of project descriptions. So long as a reasonable percentage of OER creators or adapters take the courageous step of sharing their project's description on this platform, and other practitioners get the habit of checking it, the OER community can take advantage of the resulting opportunities for collaboration or inspiration from others' work.

It may seem idealistic to believe that a sufficient number of practitioners will be willing to share. But a similar sharing site works extremely well for scholarly preprints across many STEM disciplines: arXiv.org. Our site modeled on this is called oerXiv.org and similarly shares works before they have been published in the normal way for that type of material. For OER, this means OER which are works in progress, and therefore in a state where sharing and collaboration with others working on related topics is possible.

Like a good dating site, oerXiv.org can bring together people with common experiences and interests. If they're lucky, they just may make beautiful children together.