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?