The Open Sustainable Learning Opportunities Group in the Department of Instructional Technology at Utah State University (USU), headed by Dr. David Wiley, will pilot two interrelated projects, Open Learning Support and EduCommons.  Both projects are natural extensions of Hewlett's open content strategy and move beyond production of materials to address issues of effective use and reuse of materials.

Open Learning Support (OLS) is a project to build software that enables informal learning communities to form around existing open educational content and to catalyze the formation of such communities.  The fundamental premise of OLS is that while open access to educational materials is a good start, full educational opportunity requires a user to have the social access to other human beings who can answer questions and provide support.  Since the sponsors of free and open Web-based materials cannot typically provide this access, the social support must come from other users.  OLS is designed to facilitate this access and thereby add significant value to existing open education content.

OLS is currently carried out in partnership with  MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, the Rice Connexions project, the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, and USU's own OpenContent in Education project to provide a means for users of open educational materials to seek and receive support while engaging in the learning process. 

EduCommons is open source software to manage the development of open educational content collections at very low cost.  EduCommons is designed to help institutions or individuals who have existing digitized collections of proprietary educational materials move these materials into an open access format.  For example, EduCommons software supports USU's OpenContent in Education project which is making existing USU educational materials (currently in WebCT and other closed environments) freely available for open access under a Creative Commons license.