(photo by smellyknee)

We have been interested in Open Courseware and other open leanring resources for a long time now. Dave Bauer and Caroline Meeks attended the Open Education Conference in 2006 and we were inspired.

Time and again research in education show that people learn better when they work together, and as we work with OpenACS, the obvious place to help would be to build communities around open lear(ning materials, but it seemed tricky to build a critical mass of users to make the community successful. Ideally users would form their own groups and help each other take advantage of these resources.

Then comes along the Facebook API, a way to add new applications onto the existing groups, networks, and communities of users on Facebook.com.

Solution Grove developed the Open Learning Search Facebook application to let people search of open learning materials and share them with their friends.  Our goal is to help people find each other and form groups as they use the world of open learning resources.