Many of us in the open education community give presentations and workshops for educators who want to learn about and use OER.  When educators are excited about using OER and begin to search for it, there is no easy or centralized place for them to collect what they’ve found, make notes on it, organize it in different ways, or share it with other educators.  Wouldn’t it be great if we had a place where such collections could be made, annotated, aligned with learning outcomes or subjects and shared?  We thought so.

The Open Education Consortium applied for the Living Progress Challenge, sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which offered technical support and design to social benefit organizations to build a digital  application to improve people’s lives.  The contest was open to any sector – health, education, employment, etc. – and winners are granted design & build services to make the application come to life.  Our proposal was to create a web-based application that will allow faculty to pin resources to a pinboard with a visual representation of that resource, make evolving notes about the resources, invite others to view and comment, and allow users to move resources around, including to new pinboards. If you’re familiar with these apps, what we have in mind is somewhere between Pinterest and Trello, specifically for educators and OER.

We’re really excited that this proposal was selected as one of 20 to move onto the design and prototyping phase, which we are beginning this week.  You can see the announcement here: http://livingprogresschallenge.hpe.com/  It’s our hope to blog about the process of developing the app so the open education community can be involved.  We welcome your thoughts and ideas!