Open Online Education Platform (OOEP) is a group of students, faculty, and technologists seeking to redefine higher education institutions’ approach to the shift to online education.

Since the pandemic hit, educational institutions and individuals have been working on technology solutions to the shift to online education independently. The Open EdTech Community at OOEP brings together these efforts to curate a culture of collaborative EdTech problem-solving. Acting as a centralized platform, we will connect software developers with EdTech Projects, and connect EdTech projects with educational institutions to test and provide feedback. We envision it to be a community where people can share, develop, and adopt open-source tools together.

Vision:

• Support Open-Source edTech development by connecting projects with software engineers, technical support, and educational partners for adoption
• Support higher education partners by providing open-source tools for online classroom and assisting with installation and maintenance.
• This initiative is growing out of Harvard and MIT that pushes for the adoption of open-source tools by setting up technical and administrative support.

That is, there are three spokes to this system:

• Dev Projects: Open-source EdTech Projects and individual developers
• Ed Partners: Academic departments, educational institutions, individual courses, and others looking to experiment with edTech.
• Organizers: OOEP staff and student organizations to facilitate collaboration.

We want to launch a collaborative hub of developers working on open-source tech serving higher education that is supported in practical manners by various partners (for example hosting from Harvard iLabs) and connect this hub with university partners for testing out tools (for example Learning Labs and Teaching and Learning Labs).

This is a new initiative in active development, and your ideas will play an important role in shaping how this project will evolve in the months ahead.