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Project Overview:

The OER Exchange is a hosted edtech SaaS platform that enables state librarian websites to share and exchange open-source educational content. It is embedded as part of the package ISKME provides to its clients—educational institutions that host their own open educational resource (OER) platforms. ISKME, also known as the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, is a nonprofit organization that offers avenues to host and promote OER content to educators across the United States.

Disclaimer: Due to a non-disclosure agreement, please note that everything in this study is confidential and cannot be shared outside of your organization.

Role:

Lead Product Designer and UX Researcher

Timeline:

July 2024 – September 2024

Team:

Worked with the Product Manager, Frontend and Backend Engineers, Site Administrators, and Content Managers to drive cross-functional collaboration and align with product and user goals.

Library administrators were overwhelmed by manual, time-consuming resource management and fragmented discovery

                                                 Source: OER Commons Collections

Administrators had the task of curating resources for educators and were in charge of managing thousands of open educational resources (OER). They struggled with maintaining their libraries within their sites and spent hours sifting through uploads, which is time-consuming, manual and resulted in siloed resources and less time spent on evaluating content quality.

Database size example: OER Commons hosts 121,998+ resources as of July 1, 2025 alone

Library administrators were overwhelmed by manual, time-consuming resource management and fragmented discovery

Aside from the large volume site administrators lacked a unified and streamlined process for identifying which of the thousands of submitted content were both easy to use by the educators and were effective in helping students learn. After doing some initial research and analysis we discovered that there was a consensus in how site administrators knew which content would be helpful for their educator and student communities: word of mouth from their peers.