Education, Knowledge and Data in the Context of the Sharing Economy

The Open Education model, where anyone on the planet with access to Internet can enrol in an online course, learn at their own pace, and have their assignments assessed by peers, is at the base of platforms such as Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, Skillshare. Peer-to-peer learning lowers the barrier for learning new skills and encourages even teenagers to mentor younger kids in learning how to code. A plethora of platforms facilitating collaborative information production and consumption has followed the Wikipedia interaction model: OpenStreetMap, OpenPlaques, Quora, Instructables, WikiVoyage, allowing people from varied backgrounds to get involved in the creation of information and knowledge resources. This chapter aims to examine activities such as Open Education, Open Design, knowledge and data sharing from the perspective of the sharing economy.