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iTunes U, youtube.com/edu and their own sites, like Open Yale Courses.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium, which grew out of the M.I.T. project, now includes over 200 institutions worldwide and offers materials from more than 13,000 courses. OpenCourseWare makes it possible to profit from some of the content that comes with $50,000 annual tuition at an Ivy League school, without paying that hefty price tag.

The idea driving the movement is that information should be freely shared.

someone must pay for these materials, and with the recession squeezing university budgets, open course programs are vulnerable.

For an annual cost of $125,000, or a mere 0.05 percent of the university’s $226 million budget, Utah State’s four-year-old OpenCourseWare program attracted 550,000 page views last year, making it one of the most popular in the United States, according to Marion Jensen, its former director.

The OpenCourseWare content is now being hosted on the DigitalCommons@USU Web site

how can professors and universities afford to give away the course materials that are their very livelihood?

The answer, says James D. Yager, senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, lies in why students pay to attend university in the first place. What OpenCourseWare offers, he notes, is not the full university experience: “We don’t offer the course for free, we offer the content for free,” Mr. Yager said by telephone in February. “Students take courses because they want interaction with faculty, they want interaction with one another. Those things are not available on O.C.W.

“O.C.W. is just the publishing of the content