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MIT OpenCourseWare

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MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from MIT's undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere, by the year 2007. MIT OpenCourseWare can be considered a large-scale, web-based publication of MIT course materials. The project was announced in 2001.

The initiative has encouraged a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as OpenCourseWare.

This project is jointly funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT.

The main challenge in implementing this initiative has 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 OCW material remains with MIT, members of its faculty, or its students.

As of January 2007, over 1800 courses are available online. While a few of these are limited to chronological reading lists and discussion topics, a majority provide 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 even streaming video lectures.

In 2005, MIT OpenCourseWare and other leading OCW projects formed the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which seeks to extend the reach and impact of opencourseware materials, foster new opencoursewares and develop sustainable models for opencourseware publication.

Subject matter

OCW subject matter is not limited to technology. As of June 2006, courseware is available in the following areas:

Implications

By making their educational materials openly available, MIT is demonstrating that they can give away such materials without threatening the value of an MIT education, or in other words, that there may be something in the educational process that cannot be captured in a book. However, MIT president Charles Vest stated that OpenCourseWare could improve teaching methods. This fits in with the premise of the book Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences by sociologists Seymour and Hewitt.

It is possible to look at this initiative as a shot across the bow of those who are trying to turn curricula into a commodity. Consolidation in the publishing industry has led to the formation of huge corporations that sell books and teaching materials to schools. These companies are always trying to leverage the capital value of their curricula. For example, they are, increasingly, experimenting with on-line distributed education in order to sell their content more widely and in that sense they may be trying to replace the traditional school.

Faculty may not resist OpenCourseWare as an "addition" to the current system, but many will surely resist it as a "replacement" for the current system.

History

The concept of MIT OCW grew out of the MIT Council on Education Technology, which was charged by MIT provest Robert Brown in 1999 with determining how MIT should position itself in the distance learning / e-learning environment. MIT OCW provides 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.

In September 2002, the MIT OCW proof-of-concept pilot site opened to the public, offering 32 courses. In September 2003, MIT OCW 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.

Technology

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation also supported USU's Center for Open and Sustainable Learning in the development of eduCommons, open source software that allows any organization to develop and manage their own OCW.

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.

See also


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