The OEA concept has its origins in work and discussions based on my time at the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL). I brought this idea to MIT to develop working software. I conceived of, designed and managed the development of the initial implementation of OEA.

In subsequent iterations, OEA has been further extended to integrate MIT’s DLKit (an implementation of Open Service Interface Definitions) services-based education software development approach. And OEA forms the basis for the assessments used by the Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx). OEA has also been extended by Lumen Learning in a separate fork of the software.