Motivations for OpenLearn: the Open University's Open Content Initiative

This short paper is a contribution to the OECD's expert workshop to help identify motivations, benefits and barriers for institutions producing open educational resources. The motivations will be examined by looking at the reasons behind the launch by the Open University in the UK of a web based collection of open educational resources, OpenLearn. OpenLearn is launched on October 25th 2006 and reflects an initiative backed by the William and Flora Foundation and the Open University to develop a learning environment (LearningSpace) and an accompanying educator environment (LabSpace) giving free access to material derived from Open University courses. There are of course many reasons for the taking part in open educational resources and so this paper considers motivations in community, organisational, technical and economic terms.