Open courseware and shared knowledge in higher education

Most college and university campuses in the United States and much of the developed world today maintain one, two, or several learning management systems (LMSs), which are courseware products that provide students and faculty with Web-based tools to manage course-related applications. Since the mid-1990s, two predominant models of Web courseware management systems have emerged: commercial and noncommercial. Some of the commercial products available today were created in academia as noncommercial but have since become commercially encumbered. Other products remain noncommercial but are struggling to survive in a world of fierce commercial competition. This article argues for an ethics of pedagogy in higher education that would be based on the guiding assumptions of the nonproprietary, peer-to-peer, open-source software movement.