MIT OpenCourseWare
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, partly free and openly available to anyone, anywhere, by the end of the year 2007. MIT OpenCourseWare can be considered as a large-scale, web-based publication of MIT course materials. The project was announced in October 2002 and adopts Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. This project is jointly funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT. The initiative has encouraged a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as open educational resources[citation needed].
As of June 2009, over 1900 courses were available online. While a few of these are limited to chronological reading lists and discussion topics, a majority provided homework problems and exams (often with solutions) and lecture notes. Some courses also include interactive web demonstrations in Java or MATLAB, complete textbooks written by MIT professors, and streaming video lectures.
As of June 2009, 27 courses included complete video lectures; not all of these have complete lecture notes. The video is available in streaming mode, but may also be downloaded for viewing offline. Many video and audio files are also available from iTunes U.
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[edit] Project
[edit] History
The concept for MIT OpenCourseWare grew out of the MIT Council on Education Technology, which was charged by MIT provost Robert Brown in 1999 with determining how MIT should position itself in the distance learning/e-learning environment. The MIT OpenCourseWare was then initiated to provide a new model for the dissemination of knowledge and collaboration among scholars around the world, and contributes to the “shared intellectual commons” in academia, which fosters collaboration across MIT and among other scholars. The project was spearheaded by Hal Abelson and other MIT Faculty.
The main challenge in implementing the OCW initiative had not been faculty resistance, but rather, the logistical challenges presented by determining ownership and obtaining publication permission for the massive amount of intellectual property items that are embedded in the course materials of MIT's faculty, in addition to the time and technical effort required to convert the educational materials to an online format. Copyright in MIT OpenCourseWare material remains with MIT, members of its faculty, or its students.
In September 2002, the MIT OpenCourseWare proof-of-concept pilot site opened to the public, offering 32 courses. In September 2003, MIT OpenCourseWare published its 500th course, including some courses with complete streaming video lectures. By September 2004, 900 MIT courses were available online. The response from MIT faculty and students has been very positive and MIT OpenCourseWare is seen as being consistent with MIT's mission (to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century) and is true to MIT's values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.
In 2005, MIT OpenCourseWare and other leading open educational resources projects formed the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which seeks to extend the reach and impact of open course materials, foster new open course materials and develop sustainable models for open course material publication.
[edit] Technology
MIT OCW is served by a custom content management system based on Microsoft's Content Management Server 2002. The publishing process is described by MIT as a "large-scale digital publishing infrastructure consists of planning tools, a content management system (CMS), and the MIT OpenCourseWare content distribution infrastructure"[1].
Video content for the courses are primarily in RealMedia format. Though the default videos provided are meant to be streamed from the MIT server, they are also provided in full for offline downloads.
[edit] Course departments
As of April 2009, course material was available from many MIT departments. Links in the following list are directed to articles on the general subjects listed, not to articles on the MIT departments themselves.
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[edit] See also
- OpenCourseWare
- Open educational resources
- Connexions, by Rice University
- China Open Resources for Education (CORE), MIT OCW's partnership in China
- Tufts OpenCourseWare
[edit] External links
- MIT OpenCourseWare — official site; Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese versions
- Learn for free online — BBC News, Sept 2002
- Wired: MIT Everywhere
- Opencourseware How To — designed to share the experience, key decisions, and lessons learned that led to the implementation of MIT's OpenCourseWare project.
- Open Courseware Consortium
- Wired news article
- Stanford Engineering Everywhere offers some courses for free as well
