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Besides demonstrating a student's grasp of the central subject of their studies, web portfolios promote four goals of liberal learning: recognizing connections, being reflective about intellectual and personal growth, building intellectual community, and building bridges to communities outside the academy.

The differences between open content and traditional textbooks only begin with the production and distribution of the text. When we look at the types of teaching, learning, and assessment that become more accessible when using open content, we can start to get a clearer picture of the pedagogical rationale that makes remixable and reusable content a better choice than a traditional textbook.

generally, when a text is being used within a course, the structure of the text creates the structure of the course.

The text becomes a point of reference for the ongoing work in the class.

This score was worth 70% of their final exam grade (the other 30% had been determined by their classmates in their group oral presentations). The final exam as a whole was 20% of their final (semester) grade. No one element in the final was worth more than 15% of their final grade. Personally, I always hated it when final exams were the deciding factor in your final grade for a course. Some people just don’t test well, especially at the end of a long semester. For many of my students this was their first semester of college finals and I know they were nervous. I tried to be sensitive to all of those things when thinking about the weight of this exam and its impact upon their grade.

While used textbooks are obviously less costly, they often carry another benefit new textbooks don't: highlights, underscores and other annotations by their previous owners. Even though the author of, and rationale for, the annotations may be unknown, the fact that somebody found particular sections of the book important enough to emphasize tends to make the eye linger. Ideally, annotations can make learning and knowledge discovery feel less like a solitary pursuit and more like a collaborative effort.

At first glance, it would seem that the trustworthiness of an unknown individual who has interpreted or appended an author's work would be questionable, but several reasonable assumptions can be made that contribute to the perceived authority of an unknown annotator. At the very least, they read the work and took the time to make the annotations, which may question or clarify certain statements in the text, and create links to other works, authors or ideas. The subsequent reader of an annotated work then has one or more additional perspectives from which to evaluate the usefulness of the text and annotations, and more implied permission to add his or her own interpretations than in an unannotated text. Published scholarly works are objects for discussion in an ongoing conversation among a community of knowledge seekers, and whether via formal citation in later publications or annotations in existing ones, all are designed to advance the generation and exchange of ideas.

Most critically, knowledge discovery and transfer is no longer restricted to a model of one expert creator to many consumers. In Web 2.0, consumers are creators, who can add their voices to both expert and non-expert claims. Users get the benefit of multiple perspectives and can evaluate claims in the best tradition of participative, critical inquiry.