In what appears to be a continuing interest in capitalizing on the Open Educational Resources bandwagon, Blackboard is now offering free highlighted courses through CourseSites – their free, hosted version of Blackboard Learn that lets any teacher anywhere to create up to 5 free courses.
The first course to be offered in this series is entitled “Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success.” Very cool concept. Application? To be determined. Let us know if you check out this free course and have any interesting insights to share-and-share-alike! (Ah, Creative Commons Licensing Humor.)
Online Learning and Academic Technology (formerly Office of eLearning & Innovation) 
Thanks for sharing information on the open course with Dr. Bonk! I am on the CourseSites team. I believe that working on openness is a continuous effort and it requires long term commitment, development, and innovation.
The Open Couse series is exciting, because we are all working towards how to create a better experience for students in an online environment and learning in a collaborative environment with peers.
However, the other exciting development is we have created the ability for any instructor in CourseSites to choose open enrollment, furthering the ability for anyone to teach an open course. This combined with the ability to share OER resources in CourseSItes, just creates more pieces to the puzzle of the openness efforts. I realize I am passionate about what our team is doing, but I want to share that this is not about capitalizing or jumping on the bandwagon. It is taking a free resource to the next level in order to empower our instructors through freedom to choose what kind of course (open or closed) they want to teach as well as bringing thought leaders in IST to guide the learning experience of our community!
Thanks for sharing Sarah – great perspective:)