It’s been reported numerous places that United Nations University has ramped up their OpenCourseWare project. An interesting aspect of the UNU OCW initiative has been the release of course materials under the Creative Commons Attribution license. The majority of other OCW projects have chosen to publish their materials under a version of the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. The debate about open licensing options continues (and hopefully will prompt more discussion here). While the CC-BY license is in essence more “free” from the get-go, it lacks the viral nature of the ShareAlike clause, which ensures that downstream remixes of content also remain free and open.

Full disclosure: I am a part time employee of Creative Commons, but do not endorse or recommend any specific CC license here or in any of these postings.