Very neat news from Jared Stein last night:

Tonight I release the first all-new version of the OpenShare modification for Moodle 1.9, which I demonstrated last week at OpenEd 2008. You may cut to the chase or simply download the OpenShare mod now.

Go to Jared’s blog for more info, but here’s a preview of the point-and-click sharing the mod provides:

The OpenShare mod turns Moodle into an open educational resources (OER) or opencourseware (OCW) platform by allowing instructors or designers to mark all or part of their Moodle courses as open (public) or closed (enrolled students and teachers only). The open/closed status of a module applies to Moodle’s anonymous Guest role, but goes further, adding an Open Learner role that can actually interact and complete open activities such as quizzes.

I’m not a huge fan of LMS systems in general (understatement?), but one of the major sins of the LMS has been how difficult it makes sharing. It seems to me there are two routes to reducing the replication that has made OpenCourseWare a technical burden — getting the LMS out of the content business, putting content in a single place where it can be shared by enrolled and non-enrolled alike, or solutions like this, where we turn LMS’s into OCW publishing platforms.

I’m firmly committed to the first goal as a long term solution, but short term it’s really hard to overestimate the massive effect that solutions like OpenShare can have. Such solutions remove the technical barrier to publishing thousands of already constructed courses, but even more importantly they change the culture. When training in Moodle includes instruction on how to publish open content, a strong message is sent to faculty: this decision on what one will open up is part of the course construction process, and a core part of the teaching profession.

Congrats, Jared.