Case study · Open learning

Oceanowledge

An open platform for publishing structured courses and books without trapping the source material inside a proprietary editor.

Role
Product engineer and owner
Focus
Publishing, lessons, progress, community
Stack
Elixir, Phoenix, LiveView, PostgreSQL
Status
Independent product · Active
Oceanowledge homepage showing structured courses and books
The problem

Good learning material is often hard to move and harder to finish.

Course content becomes scattered across documents, video platforms, private learning systems, and notes. Authors lose portability, while learners get long pages without a clear path, checkpoints, or visible progress.

The product

Portable content, shaped into a learning path.

Oceanowledge imports ordinary Markdown and ZIP bundles, then turns them into navigable courses and books.

  • Organize material into chapters, lessons, theory, examples, checklists, and quizzes.
  • Import and update content from files authors can keep under their own control.
  • Track lesson completion and overall progress without hiding the underlying structure.
  • Support ratings, comments, and discovery around openly published material.
  • Make long-form books and step-by-step courses feel related but purpose-built.
  • Keep authoring simple enough that content can be reviewed outside the application.
The AI boundary

AI can accelerate authorship without owning the source.

Models can help outline, expand, translate, or review educational material, but the durable artifact remains editable content. Authors can inspect the Markdown, revise it with ordinary tools, and publish only what they stand behind.

This keeps AI useful without turning the platform into a black box or making a course dependent on a specific provider.

Engineering ownership

Content architecture is product architecture.

I designed the publishing model, import format, course and book readers, progress rules, quizzes, community features, moderation boundaries, interface, and deployment. The central design choice was to make portability a product feature—not an export added later.

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