Issues in making courseware exploitable

There are currently substantial investments being made in courseware development in the UK, and the hope which underpins these development efforts is that Higher Education institutions will eagerly adopt and exploit the freely available courseware which emerges from them. Unfortunately, there are many reasons why this is probably going to be an over-optimistic assumption. The bottlenecks which can impair the successful exploitation of courseware range from cultural to technical. In this paper we discuss some of these bottleneck issues and suggest approaches to dealing with them.