Sharing open educational resources (OER) holds enormous potential for saving educational costs. After all, much of what professors teach and students learn is largely similar everywhere. Why not source online knowledge from crowds of open resources instead of having each campus create its own firewalled virtual web resources for subjects studied on myriad campuses? For essentially every/any subject there are already excellent online open webpages; the GoldenSwamp Study Subject Sampler connects to some examples.
A new IT project, “Colleges Try ‘Crowdsourcing’ Help Desks to Save Money,” may sketch a blueprint for crowdsourcing OER (knowledge webpages) as well as supplying IT help (people and their posts):
. . . So, in a few weeks, the university will try something different: letting computer users answer one another’s questions.
Information-technology people call this “crowdsourcing,” a buzzword that puts a positive spin on leaving the job of writing and editing to volunteers rather than hired experts. The idea is to open a Web site where students and professors can post their IT woes and share their solutions. College officials tell me they hope it will grow into a self-service support center for colleges nationwide—a kind of Wikipedia for campus computer problems.
After all, professors and students everywhere suffer from the same digital headaches: glitches in Blackboard’s online grade book, corrupted Microsoft Word files on the day a term paper is due, problems checking college e-mail messages on their iPhones, and the like . . . .
