Open publication of course materials on the Internet (or in any medium) introduces considerations beyond what is involved in preparing materials for classroom use. Chief among them are “contextualization” (scrubbing out irrelevant data such as class meeting location, and adding context that sets the course within the larger curriculum), addition of metadata (to support online search and other functions), and copyright clearance. Moreover, the opencourseware publication as a whole benefits from common presentation standards, so materials often need to be reformatted into standard templates.

The publication process itself begins with planning and prioritizing the course “pipeline,” then acquiring course content (either from raw materials or by “harvesting” from course Web sites or course management systems), clearing intellectual property, contextualizing, adding metadata, formatting the material for opencourseware publication, conducting a quality assurance review, and publishing to the opencourseware Web site.