Open courseware and Open Educational Resources started as an idea and a vision and, over the course of a decade, have morphed in to a Worldwide effort to bring free, high-quality educational materials to the masses.

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Great Article over at Wired about how PBS is planning on releasing hundreds of Nova interviews as Creative Commons-licensed content. This is great for news for open courseware content creators who want to include this material in their courses. Essentially, the license allows the creator (PBS) to retain full copyright privileges on the content, but allow the public to freely share, distribute, copy and transmit the work.

Education is expensive. Not only is it expensive, but costs at some U.S. universities are skyrocketing at ten to twenty times the current rate of inflation. To give you an example, I’ve been attending Michigan State University since August of 2002 (four years as an undergraduate and two as a grad student). In that six years, tuition for in-state undergraduates has jumped from $179.75 to $277.50 per credit hour. That’s an increase of over 60% in 6 years—obviously our current system is not sustainable.

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