This is really pretty neat, although the focus is very narrow:

In an effort to jump-start the creation of freely available, easily understood classroom lessons and textbooks about parallel computing, Rice is co-sponsoring a contest with $500 cash prizes for the five best lessons submitted to the open-education site Connexions. The contest – the 2008-’09 Open Education Cup – will kick off Nov. 15-21 in Austin, Texas, at SC08, the world’s largest annual supercomputing convention and trade show.

Much of the rest of the press release deals with the education problem this addresses. With the advent of consumer multi-core processors, techniques which were once the domain of supercomputing are now needed for a much wider range of applications — but the courses to teach these techniques just don’t exist currently in most CS departments.

What I find most interesting about this is the overall cost. Outside the administration of this contest (which admittedly is most of the cost to Rice), the cost of offering five $500 cash prizes is $2500.

If this approach is successful, Rice may end up bettering the education of hundreds or thousands of students with these five classes — for what amounts to pocket change. This is obviously a nascent, very narrowly focused effort. But if it is successful, I can’t imagine it not being a model for at least some future development of OCW, in areas far more diverse.