As in the past two weeks we talked a lot about sharing economies today I want to talk about an example of this topic in the field of education.Oilproject was created just as a “skills barter” in 2004, when Marco De Rossi and some of his geek friends started to share their skills online. It then became the first web-site for educational contents’ free sharing in Italy.
As De Rossi says, the project grew out of a real need: he was good at programming in php, but didn’t know Linux, and the IT courses at his school were way too expensive. He then got in contact with people in the opposite situation, so they started to teach each other via chat. At that time they were not aware of the concept of sharing knowledge. Two years leater, Khan Academy was founded in the US, the biggest educational web-site for sharing classes online. Both Oilproject and Khan Academy start format the idea that anyone, anywhere can learn something one day and the next day can teach something he knows.
But the sharing system is not a random dynamics, so the Oilproject staff takes care of keeping the community active, by producing contents everyday, paying attention that they are of high quality. So each time they publish a class, they first want to check its quality. “It is a selective sharing method, so it’s normal that the final users are much more numerous than the ones who share contents” explains De Rossi.
Find out more:
http://www.oilproject.org/
https://www.khanacademy.org/
For more info:
http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy