Dive Brief:

• On Wednesday, online course platform Versal announced a new marketplace for teachers to find and share content they can use to build online courses or learning models.
• The marketplace, known as the Versal Gadget Market, is still in beta but already features over 1,000 “gadgets,” which can include interactive exercises, video, text, or images.
• It will include teacher-made content, as well as materials from companies like Wolfram Research, which will build math exercises for teachers to use.

Dive Insight:

The move is one more step toward the collaborative vision of course development that Versal has charted for its online courses. This spring, the company announced the official launch of its completed course development platform, which allows teachers to easily build interactive exercises and diagrams. It also lets teachers create course skeletons for students to build themselves, as a way to drive student-led learning.

“It’s amazing how you develop if you have to think, ‘How am I going to teach somebody else something?’” Versal co-founder Gregor Freund told Education Dive back in March. The company had already added features that let multiple people work on a course together, and the Gadget Market expands that even further with the goal of eventually allowing teachers to search thousands of different gadgets to build their courses.

Teacher-centered content marketplaces have begun to crop up more often as companies find ways to participate in the boom in tech-driven learning. Teachers have asked for more collaborative spaces for course design, and companies like Versal have delivered.