When education moves online, that creates a need for new learning materials that are available online, can be broadly disseminated via the internet, can be displayed to and used by learners on technological devices such as computers, smartphones, or tablets, are up-to-date, affordable and available for public schools, in line with schools’ curricula, and matching the individual needs of the learners and their educators. Three trends have made such technology-compatible, up-to-date, high-quality learning materials tailored to individual students’ needs wanted at large scale: The pandemic-induced home schooling, the generally increasing importance of learning with educational technology, and the trend towards personalized learning. While the educational technology infrastructure is being developed at scale, the experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic have revealed that the development of learning materials for online learning lags behind. This article proposes a simple solution to all of these problems: Systematic crowdsourced creation of open educational resources.
A simple, affordable, scaled-up way of creating materials for personalized learning with educational technology: Crowdsourcing Open Educational Resources (preprint)