Smart societies rely more and more on community-based and digitally-enabled sharing of information. In Education, the communal (many-to-many/one-to-many) and peer-to-peer (one-to-one) sharing of digital resources is grounded in providing/receiving access to media files such as books, music, movies, games, i.e. information that can be used for learning purposes.
OER sharing seems to have an important role in increasing efficiency for teachers – who can creatively use, customize, and reshare them, and produce derivative resources. In addition, by being openly accessible and not incurring in additional costs, they allow for learners and self-learners to prepare for classes beforehand and navigate them according to their learning needs. Besides teaching/learning-related communities of practice, teachers can also share their OER in other repositories, for instance, Wikimedia Commons, Slideshare and SoundCloud.