Well, creating good education content is certainly an unsolved problem, but nod.
> document their entire course, [...] is really hard
That was the MIT OCW experience as well.
Hmm... thinking aloud...
I wonder how hard it might be to do bulk ingestion of existing OER content to seed such a literate-programming/github/npm but-for-text platform. Slice-and-dice and index, so it's immediately useful for easily pulling together custom content. Though profs creating slides are unconcerned by copyright, so obtaining material by googling seems likely easier than even well indexed ingested OER content.
And the challenges of an accessible UI are not small. One of the unrealized potentials of OneLaptopPerChild was having a community that mixed domain experts with software devs, so one could look ahead to a much lower-barrier MVPs for collaborative content creation. Hmm, so what might motivate people already skilled at git-horrible ui to work on text...?
Perhaps one could find some content niche which somehow inspired people to work together, using a platform with good bones, but without a so-hard-to-make broadly-accessible GUI. For illustration, introductory astronomy courses are common, and best-selling textbooks don't even bother to get the color of the Sun right. So one might imagine the astronomy community, which has coding skills, getting enthused by a "finally, an introductory astronomy textbook which isn't wretched". Or no, maybe not so much. It might be interesting to learn which OER textbooks have achieved wide use, if any. Use them as a market probe for communities which are already receptive to an OER-shaped effort? And hope one of those communities has unmet authoring needs, and the skills to tolerate an MVP ui. Ah well, thanks for the thought exercise.
Well, creating good education content is certainly an unsolved problem, but nod.
> document their entire course, [...] is really hard
That was the MIT OCW experience as well.
Hmm... thinking aloud...
I wonder how hard it might be to do bulk ingestion of existing OER content to seed such a literate-programming/github/npm but-for-text platform. Slice-and-dice and index, so it's immediately useful for easily pulling together custom content. Though profs creating slides are unconcerned by copyright, so obtaining material by googling seems likely easier than even well indexed ingested OER content.
And the challenges of an accessible UI are not small. One of the unrealized potentials of OneLaptopPerChild was having a community that mixed domain experts with software devs, so one could look ahead to a much lower-barrier MVPs for collaborative content creation. Hmm, so what might motivate people already skilled at git-horrible ui to work on text...?
Perhaps one could find some content niche which somehow inspired people to work together, using a platform with good bones, but without a so-hard-to-make broadly-accessible GUI. For illustration, introductory astronomy courses are common, and best-selling textbooks don't even bother to get the color of the Sun right. So one might imagine the astronomy community, which has coding skills, getting enthused by a "finally, an introductory astronomy textbook which isn't wretched". Or no, maybe not so much. It might be interesting to learn which OER textbooks have achieved wide use, if any. Use them as a market probe for communities which are already receptive to an OER-shaped effort? And hope one of those communities has unmet authoring needs, and the skills to tolerate an MVP ui. Ah well, thanks for the thought exercise.