Creating Educational Resources at Scale

Rising college tuitions are putting increasing financial pressure on families, while at the same time, teachers are repeating tasks like grading and problem creation thousands of times across campuses. Open educational resources (OERs) have the promise of reducing this inefficiency, offering higher quality education at lower cost. However, the adoption of OERs remains limited in part due to issues with organization, quality, search, and fit to the curriculum of individual classrooms. This paper presents a new format for OERs based on a common course skeleton shared among a community of students and instructors. That community jointly creates and improves educational resources around that skeleton. This model resolves many of the classical problems in finding and organizing OERs. We present ways to use such communities to create richer educational resources, such as intelligent tutoring systems (ITS).