The education community has been at the forefront in envisioning and conceptualizing infrastructures intended for utilizing and sharing digital content or resources. However, this community has faced challenges in making these visions a reality. We begin by describing a relatively early attempt at creating an economy for sharing educational resources, referred to as learning objects. We then discuss two approaches to opening up educational contents to the world under the auspices of the more recent Open Educational Resources movement. One of these approaches has focused on creating open resources from scratch, utilizing Wiki content development and management technologies in the wake of the phenomenal success of Wikipedia. A second approach is represented by developments in Open Courseware. Following the example of MIT's Open Courseware, this approach has more recently been adopted by many other educational institutions under the OCW Consortium. We conclude by making the case that this second approach may represent the most promising of recent developments in the adaptation of open source and open content to educational practices and technologies.

Keywords

OCW · MIT · learning objects · challenges · OpenCourseWare · wiki · web 2.0 · OER creation