Wired Campus covers the use of widgets to share courseware:

Mark C. Marino, a lecturer in the writing program at the University of Southern California, has turned his Web page for a writing course he’s teaching into a series of modular “widgets” that others can easily drop into their own Web pages.

Mr. Marino says that using Web widgets for online course materials furthers the goals of open courseware, efforts by professors and colleges to give away their lecture notes and other teaching materials online.

The article doesn’t mention it, but this is part of a broader movement to find ways to hack simple content embedding for course materials — a slightly older example is the “append wiki page” function that D’Arcy Norman demonstrates in this screencast.

What I find interesting personally is how as professors get used to the open web these tools and behaviors start to develop organically. The page that Marino has constructed out of these is, well, a bit of a design anti-pattern, at least as far as layout and organization. But the culture is right on target — and that’s the more important bit.

I’m convinced many people steer away from OpenCourseWare because they believe it is more complex and restrictive than it truly is. OpenCourseWare, as defined by the Consortium, has a fairly broad definition. On our membership application we define it as:

Free and open digital publication of high quality university-level educational materials — often including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, and exams organized as courses.

It doesn’t require video lectures. You don’t have to have audio, or flash widgets. You don’t have to package things in an obscure XML format.

You have a high-quality course, taught from an organized set of materials? Publish those materials on the web for others to use in a comprehensible format. Using whatever tools you want. That’s it in a nutshell.

I think most universities could find a course or two amenable to such publication and get it up in fairly short order.

There’s not really a technical barrier. For the most part it’s just sharing what you have.

Which leaves only the question of why. Why in this participant-driven, Web 2.0 world of authentic connectivist learning would something as dull sounding as sharing courseware be important?

There’s a thousand answers to that, and at the risk of boring the the converted I hope to post some of those answers on this blog from time to time.

But here’s my personal take. Borrowing from Siemens curation metaphor, courseware is a like a curated exhibit, minutes before the doors open to the public. From a vast array of alternate choices, a professor has pulled together a set of carefully chosen readings and problems (the artwork or museum pieces) and put together a guidebook (lecture notes or lectures). Ideally, they’ve also arranged the work in a progression that makes sense — historical or thematic.

That curation can be as valuable to the world as the research one publishes — yet we hide it somewhere, in hard copies or LMS’s, keep it away from people to whom it could be useful, whether they be other professors, self-learners, or one’s own potential students.

Anyway, that’s my metaphor… what’s yours?

There was a decent article recently in BusinessWeek about CC efforts, notable for a couple reasons: first, it’s a good introduction to the transition that Creative Commons is undergoing as Lessig focusses elsewhere and Ito takes over (Ito sees his job as turning Creative Commons into a “global mass market brand”), and second the Consortium gets a prominent mention:

Even so, the movement has influential backers. Microsoft’s (MSFT) Word, Excel, and Powerpoint software now come with tools to set up Creative Commons licenses, and Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) allow users to search for Creative Commons-licensed films, photos, and books. More than 200 universities worldwide have joined OpenCourseWare, a group that distributes Creative Commons-licensed course materials for free. (Through OpenCourseWare, Japan’s Shinsei Bank said in April it would let the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur teach students about the intricacies of the bank’s computer network.)