Social Mechanisms to Motivate Learning with Remote Experiments - Design Choices to Foster Online Peer-based Learning

If we consider knowledge to be the result of a negotiation process about references and meaning between individuals, then, we should consider it also a collective or social property. This view underlies numerous initiatives worldwide providing unrestricted online access to educational content, software tools, and implementation resources, commonly referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER). In earlier research on the use of Open Educational Resources at the organization, we addressed the issue of sustainability of OER projects in terms of organization, motivation, types of resources, types of reuse, and funding and revenue models. In this paper, we focus on how social mechanisms can contribute to increase motivation amongst stakeholders to maintain and create useful content, and engage in meaningful interactions within learning communities.