Page:A Review of the Open Educational Resources Movement.pdf/14

 *Emergence of searching tools for open educational resources, for example, a subset of the Internet Archive. MIT is now reporting close to 16 million visits since October 2003; these visits are split about evenly between first-time and repeat visits. The site now includes some material for most every course taught at MIT. Although the mix of material varies by course, the overall mix now includes the following: syllabus, course calendar, lecture notes, assignments, exams, problem and solution sets, labs and projects, hyper-textbooks, simulations, tools and tutorials, and video lectures. There is extensive detail on the use and impact on the MIT OpenCourseWare website.
 * Increasing attention to the relationship between open courseware production and the development of open source course management systems (e. g. the Sakai Project).
 * The growing appreciation of the Creative Commons project, including most germane to OCW, the attribution and share-alike licenses.
 * Strategic visions about the future of higher education and concepts of global meta universities from academic thought leaders such as Charles M. Vest (President Emeritus of MIT) and James J. Duderstadt (President Emeritus of the University of Michigan) fueled in part by the OCW movement.

The MIT OpenCourseWare Project is noteworthy in its scale, completeness, quality, and positive influence on others. It is, however, basically a digital publishing model of high-quality, pre-credentialed, static material. The Connexions Project complements the MIT project in that it provides not only a rapidly growing collection of free scholarly material but also a set of free software tools to help authors publish and collaborate; instructors build rapidly and share custom courses; and learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines. It focuses on building and supporting communities of digital object consumers and producers who credential material.

Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Although Connexions began with a focus on digital signal processing, its Content Commons now contains educational materials for a wide audience, from children to college students to professionals, organized in small modules across growing topic areas that are easily connected to larger courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons attribution license.

Connexions feels more like an ecosystem than a library with rich cross links that can compose new learning objects from old ones. It is thus a start toward an