At this moment in time what is this commons currently learning together?
What is the most pressing thing to learn right now?
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Hmm… my impression now is that the OLC might not necessarily be about specific, organized, structured learning going on in terms of courses or compiling material, but being “open” in the sense that many individuals do their own self-directed learning for themselves while potentially sharing bits and pieces of it here over time. Looks like it’s intended to serve as a space and community for/of people to occasionally share their learnings, but not necessarily to conduct a learning practice on/within this space itself. Therefore the learning is to be picked up from individual connections/exchanges you engage in with people.
For sure there are a bunch of prominent topics, but they do not necessarily get covered in a thorough, comprehensive way; instead, they get openly, emergently, opportunistically discussed as it seems fit.
One tangible “commons” to potentially steward are the posts published in some of the tools, as some of them are libre-freely licensed (legally a commons as in “Creative Commons”), but that material tends to be conversational in nature, so you can figure for yourself how practically, generally useful it is in other contexts than updating one brain at a time. Still, it remains a major advantage in contrast to many other places/spaces.
That’s about it for a brief summary of what I’ve learned about the OLC so far. Don’t miss to have a look into some of the channels on the Mattermost (via DigLife sign-on), a bunch of great contributions accumulated in there!
I agree with some of what @skreutzer said, but some bits are too constraining. My mental model for OLC is like an archipelago of self-directed individuals, and also self-directed co-learning groups. Those groups are free to organize themselves around any topic, or set of topics, and can be more or less “organized” in terms of how they structure and coordinate their learning together. We’re also not trying to dictate what tools any group uses, but hopefully over time some useful patterns emerge and are shared amongst the groups like a Networked Improvement Community…
So, there is no objective “best” topic to learn, as what is best for you won’t be the same for someone else… Though, I take from your post that it would be useful to enable something like an emergent map that allows those in the archipelago to make explicit what they are interested in learning in the context of a peer-learning group, and create something like an attractor to gather others who have a shared interest, a place to co-curate what resources they want to go through together, coordinate on if they will do that in sync with each other (or maybe asynchronous is fine), and then, as Stephan shared… hopefully those group can find a way to share some fruits of that co-learning so that other learners in the archipelago can benefit from it in the future. (This fits into a pattern that I like to call “learning out loud”… It might seem like that sort of documentation wouldn’t exactly be useful to others, unless it gets polished up first… But I actually think those raw traces we leave in the sand also hold the potential for stigmergy in the ecosystem, and maybe they also help form a map… The other pattern that I know you value @Bridgetime, because we’ve talk about it… is what I think you called The Feynman Technique… which is basically says that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else, which I think fits perfectly into a P2P learning collective)
In some sense Open Learning Commons is whatever we make it, there isn’t anyone here telling you what you “should” do, or “should” learn 
Just in case this is in reference to Engelbart’s concept of a NIC, the very description/design/policy you just outlined prevents the OLC from being somewhat similar. To be very brief, an Engelbartian NIC has an objective and best topic, be it solving a complex, urgent problem or improving a community of practice, and there are a bunch of principles/approaches/strategies how this is achieved, for example bootstrapping (towards such a goal) or ABC improvement, or the co-development of their own tools/methodologies (dogfooding), the ViewSpecs and augmentation play an important role too, etc. etc.
The OLC on the other hand might be a “NIC” in the sense that its members, @Bridgetime or me can network with some people, improve in some ways, in the regular paper/Web/conversational fashion, and in that capacity the OLC is probably one of the better ones, as several tools get deployed to facilitate it, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to an Engelbartian NIC and the hopes for exponential (or at least significantly synergistic) improvement the latter is all about.
But please, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind or care too much about any particular style of such “spaces”, I think they all have their respective place and purpose 
