Static Portlets are another interesting tool for publishing information.
Currently Sloan is using static-portlets to publish a Research Links portlet (a list of useful html links from generated by library personnel) in every user's portal.
We are considering expanding the functionality of static-portlets to allow them to have more then 4000 characters and to allow them to be either sharable (the original owner continues to control the content) or copiable (the new owner can modify the content) between portals.
One of the questions you have to ask yourself is do you want each class to have a copy of these shared files that they can modify or do you want them to have a pointer to a centrally maintained file?
If you want want to centrally maintain there resources, you might want to do is create a static portlet with links to the files.