While the concept of a “sharing economy” is often associated with industries such as transport and hospitality, it’s also becoming increasingly common in education. Institutions share courses, publish open educational resources (OER), and collaborate from afar—all with the promise of reducing duplication, increasing access, and improving efficiency.
However, in practice, it rarely works that way. Educators still spend hours recreating learning materials, while content exported from one platform often becomes unusable in another. Systems fail to integrate effectively, leaving data siloed and workflows fragmented. Instead of enabling reuse, many digital environments force institutions to recreate what already exists, wasting time and limiting scalability.
The issue, then, isn’t a lack of content—it’s a lack of thoughtful infrastructure. A true sharing economy in education depends on interoperable, flexible, and portable systems, supported by open source platforms and open standards that enable collaboration without sacrificing control.
Below, we explore how the idea of a sharing economy has evolved in education, why content sharing alone isn’t the answer, and how open infrastructure enables more effective collaboration.
What Is the Sharing Economy in Education?
The sharing economy boils down to the core principle of access over ownership. But while this concept originated in sectors that share physical assets, education has adapted it to focus on the sharing of knowledge and ideas.
Benefits of the sharing economy in education can include:
- Reduced spending and effort: Educators can reuse existing content—rather than recreating it—saving time, money, and energy for other things.
- Expanded access to higher-quality, consistent resources: Initiatives such as open educational resources (OER) and cross-institutional course sharing enable educators to access materials beyond their own, helping to reduce disparities in resource availability and consistency.
- Improved collaboration: Shared curricula, co-developed assessments, and joint program delivery enable greater collaboration. For instance, universities might publish course materials openly, and many partner to deliver joint degrees.
- Increased flexibility: Modular learning pathways and credit transfers are supported for students, while teachers can adapt resources to suit different contexts.
Why the Sharing Economy Fails Without Infrastructure
Despite an increase in shared content, the focus has predominantly been on making content more readily available, rather than reusable. While resources may be accessible across institutions, they’re often tied to specific platforms or stored in proprietary formats, limiting their transferability.
When educators attempt to reuse content, issues quickly emerge. Formatting can break, and functionality is often lost. For example, drag-and-drop tasks may stop working, multimedia files may not load correctly, or interactive activities might import as static text. This often requires certain components—or the whole resource—to be rebuilt.
Digital assessments present an even greater challenge. These rely on structured data, specific delivery engines, and built-in security features, meaning tests designed in one system may not function correctly in another.
These challenges are amplified by closed ecosystems that restrict how content and data move between platforms. As a result, systems become fragmented, manual workarounds become necessary, and duplication becomes the default. This highlights a critical issue: Educational infrastructure needs to be redesigned to make the sharing economy viable in education.
The Role of Interoperability in the Sharing Economy
For a sharing economy to function within education, interoperability is essential. Interoperable systems are designed to work together smoothly to exchange content, data, and functionality across different digital ecosystems. This is more than just connecting systems—it ensures the original behavior and formatting of learning materials are preserved.
Open standards play an important role in this, acting as a common language that different systems understand. In digital assessments, for example, the QTI standard defines how test items are structured and exchanged, so interactions, logic, and media are consistently and correctly displayed across platforms, rather than converting to static text.
By embedding interoperability at the system level, educators can create the content once and reuse it across multiple environments. Shared resources can also flow smoothly between institutions, reducing errors and ensuring content performs as intended, regardless of platform.
Interoperability also extends to data, allowing results to be transferred and analyzed across platforms, encouraging consistent tracking and thorough insights. For multi-institution environments, this is especially critical for informed decision-making.
However, it’s important to recognize that these benefits fully depend on interoperability being embedded from the beginning. Retrospectively shoehorning compatibility into closed systems is often complex and can present a host of new issues. But when interoperability is considered from the start, content becomes truly reusable.
How Open Source Enables Scalable Sharing in Education
Open source refers to systems whose code is accessible, editable, and collaboratively developed. While open standards enable systems to communicate smoothly, open source provides the actual foundation for building and sustaining a shared infrastructure.
Open source systems support shared ecosystems while preserving institutional independence, allowing educators to move away from proprietary, vendor-controlled systems toward more flexible models.
Instead of relying entirely on external providers, institutions can adapt systems to meet their specific needs while also contributing to the development of shared tools. In addition, this allows institutions to retain ownership of their data, maintain control over how systems are configured, and choose how and when to implement any changes.
This combination of adaptability and control encourages the reuse of materials while supporting long-term sustainability and scalability across multiple institutions or regions. A shared open source platform can grow as more institutions adopt it without requiring duplicated infrastructure.
Collaboration also becomes more meaningful. Organizations can share improvements and build on each other’s work without being blocked by outdated systems. This accelerates innovation and leads to higher-quality educational resources.
By enabling this kind of shared development, open source shifts the sharing economy from content to infrastructure, allowing institutions to share systems and resources at scale while maintaining independence.
Why a Sharing Economy Matters for Public-Sector Education Systems
Public-sector institutions often operate under similar conditions, yet much of this work happens in isolation. This results in repeated investment in developing learning and assessment materials from scratch when these already exist elsewhere.
Shared infrastructure offers a solution to this inefficiency. By enabling and encouraging reuse across institutions, duplication can be reduced, regional or national collaboration becomes more practical, and public funding can be used more efficiently.
Another critical factor is procurement. Proprietary systems can lock institutions into long-term vendor dependence, making it harder to adapt to changing needs. But open, standards-based systems support a more modular approach, allowing organizations to evolve technology without starting from scratch.
Shared infrastructure also addresses the issue of equity. For instance, smaller or less well-funded institutions can access content, workflows, and systems they couldn’t develop themselves, ensuring learners receive comparable tools and resources across institutions.
Ultimately, strategic infrastructure decisions help to shape the efficiency, scalability, and inclusivity of education systems.
Rethinking the Sharing Economy in Education: From Content to Systems
To realize the full potential of a sharing economy in education, institutions should focus on how their systems enable (or prevent) the sharing of content. This starts with evaluating digital environments by following these steps:
- Audit duplication across systems: Identify where assessments and learning resources are duplicated across departments or campuses to highlight inefficiencies and opportunities for reuse.
- Test portability in real scenarios: Move content between systems to check if functionality (e.g., interactions, logic) is preserved.
- Prioritize open standards: Ensure systems align with standards to enable long-term flexibility and reuse.
- Define ownership and governance: Confirm who owns, edits, and shares content to maintain control while enabling collaboration.
- Set approval and quality processes: Establish workflows for reviewing shared resources to ensure consistency.
- Pilot before scaling: Test shared workflows in controlled environments first to reduce risk and refine processes.
- Evaluate interoperability holistically: Check if systems exchange content and data seamlessly, to ensure infrastructure supports sharing—not silos.
Conclusion
A solid sharing economy in education doesn’t just happen naturally with increased access to content. It must be intentionally designed through insightful and strategic infrastructure choices. Without interoperability, portability, and long-term flexibility, even the best resources remain locked—forcing institutions to duplicate their efforts, rather than building on existing, shared work.
Designing for reuse therefore means prioritizing infrastructure: systems that can exchange data seamlessly, support standardized formats (such as the QTI standard), and adapt over time as needs and technology evolve.
One way to achieve this is to use a digital assessment platform like TAO—built on open source principles and open standards to support modular, flexible, and collaborative assessments across authoring, delivery, and reporting.
To explore how this could work for you, schedule a demo and get started with TAO today.