A distributed content addressable network for open educational resources

Abstract

We introduce Content Addressable Resources for Education (CARE) as a method for addressing issues of scale, access, management and distribution that currently exist for open educational resources (OER) as they are currently developed in higher education. CARE is based on the concept of the distributed web (dweb) and, using (for example) the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) provides a means to distributed OER in such a way that they cannot be blocked or paywalled, can be associated with each other (for example, as links in a single site, or as newer versions of existing resources) creating what is essentially an open resource graph (ORG), and when accessed through applications such as Beaker Browser, can be cloned and edited by any user to create and share new resources.