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.