Open Contentment

There doesn't seem to have been much in the way of fanfares and flashing lights about this, but last month the Open University announced their Open Content Initiative. The idea is that as, over the years, it has made programmes freely available over the TV and radio for anyone to watch or listen to, it will start publishing some of its books and other course materials on the interweb for anyone to read. This sounds great to me: you can get a good source of educational materials for free, or you can pay to get the full tuition and matriculation package. I'm not sure what or how much will be published this way in the near future, but they have £5.65M to spend on the project.