Enabling Open Educational Resource Adoption through Integrated Sharing in PrairieLearn
This tool paper introduces the PrairieLearn Question Sharing System (PQSS), which enables instructors to share questions and question generators with other instructors, either as open educational resources or privately. PQSS is directly integrated into PrairieLearn, an open- source, problem-driven online learning platform. PQSS addresses a critical need for more open-source assessments by making it easier for instructors to share assessments they’ve created and for instructors to use those assessments. Instructors often don’t share questions that they have created due to the time it takes to publish them and the lack of recognition for their work. Because it is directly integrated into PrairieLearn, PQSS reduces the aforementioned friction of sharing and using shared questions, and we can report usage statistics to help question authors receive recognition for their work. In this paper, we share design and implementation details of the system, as well as experiences using it to share course content across courses and between universities.