[mncharity]

> we’re thinking a little bit about a Git Version Control or github-esque software for storing, documenting, sharing and iterating on curriculum

That could be wonderful.

There've been attempts at creating sites for customizing OER texts. But creating communities is hard. Especially as a closed-source VC startup.

It might be nice to support transclusion. Sort of the textual equivalent of importing a code library. So one might say "insert here, that introduction to topic X", and have it track someone else's iterative progress on introducing X.

[aramachandran7]

[op here] - Yep, when we stumbled across this idea we really, really liked it... however, this appeared to be a really neat solution to a problem that didn't actually exist.

Lots of profs are super busy with grading, securing tenure, research, and ultimately don't really care that much about the fine details of their course content. Motivating profs to document their entire course, class by class, with teacher notes, is really hard.

Here's an example of an olin college course opened up to the public ... it's a pain in the ass to make a course 'teachable by others'. https://courses.olin.edu/e4h/

Also on top of the above barrier, +1, creating a strong community out of profs who care about teaching would be hard.

[mncharity]

> problem that didn't actually exist

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.