When I first read Brian Lamb’s post on easy and inexpensive course hosting, I missed the link he made to a presentation by Jim Groom and D’Arcy Norman at the Open Education 2007 Conference.

But I just followed the link and I am impressed by the way they went about presenting the idea of building your own courses in Wordpress (and hosting them at Wordpress.com). They don’t just talk about it, they do it and share the experience, including the limitations with anyone who is interested.

They give five reasons for using Wordpress.com to build open content. It is free, has a large community of users, it is easy to use, has lots of services and its portable (if you out grow it, you can take your stuff with you). If you want to extend it, add to the code, you can set up Wordpress on your own server.

That is what we do at the UNU Media Studio. We also benefit from accessing the large number of plug-ins available. We build on these plug-ins and share back with the community.

They are right – developing and sharing open content should not be rocket science – anyone should be able to do it.