Discussion: One of the leading friction-reducing phenomena flowing from mobility is the so-called Sharing Economy, with proponents such as Airbnb and Uber, wherein somebody creates a mobile application which makes it trivially easy for any person A who needs X to find and make a deal with any person Y, who is willing to offer X, whatever that X is. And yes, all of this still involves some work and frustration for you, but with AI the deficiencies of a sharing economy can be mitigated or resolved.
523 Inspiration: For example, there have been innumerable repositories for Open Education Resources (OERs) over the last decade, but none of them have taken off yet. What is the magic Sharing Economy formula by which educators and learners will be able to achieve their separate objectives more easily?
This sharing economy is also one of the frontiers that stands out to me, partly because in my current role at the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, I support faculty, students, and staff who are interested in incorporating OER into teaching and learning.
One reason the sharing economy works is that there are incentives for both sides. In the case of OER, there must be benefits for both contributors and users.
Creating OER requires resources, and incentives are often necessary. At UBC, for example, there are incentives such as funding (https://oerfund.open.ubc.ca/
) and recognition of open educational resources in the tenure and promotion process for faculty (https://sparcopen.org/news/2017/recognizing-open-tenure-promotion-ubc/
). However, not all BC institutions provide funding or incentives to create OER, and in reality, there are often stronger incentives for people to produce paid textbooks.
On the user side, instructors want textbooks they can adopt immediately for their courses, but such resources are not always available in OER repositories.
Disclaimer:
Although the ideas are my own, I used ChatGPT-5 to improve sentence structure, grammar, and flow. I proofread the output and reprompted after incorporating ChatGPT to my writing.