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In the year 2000, an MIT faculty committee on lifelong learning proposed a program that
was as straightfoward it was revolutionary. "The idea is simple: just to publish our teaching
material, our course content, online, on the internet, and make it widely available to
everyone who could use it for free." OpenCourseWare - OCW - is MIT's web-based initiative that
offers open access to the core teaching materials syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams
from 1800 courses free of charge for educators and learners worldwide. "The idea that we
came up with, OpenCourseWare, was really a revolutionary idea, particularly at the time.
Because in 1999, it was the heyday of the dot-com era, and everyone was thinking of
a for-profit model. Although we considered it, we felt that for MIT, the right thing
to do the right model, is to give away the teaching materials." "Some faculty thought
it was the dumbest idea, that MIT was giving away our intellectual property to the world
for free, and no one would use their textbooks anymore, no one would come to classes anymore,
et cetera, et cetera, and other people thought it was the best social good they'd ever heard
of. Through the generous support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation and the Ab Initio Corporation, MIT has published materials from virtually
all MIT undergraduate and graduate courses on the OCW site, representing thirty-three
academic disciplines. In addition to the core teaching materials, the site includes animations,
simulations and more than one thousand hours of classroom instruction on video. "It's important
to keep in mind, that we are not offering an MIT education through OpenCourseWare. So
for example, you don't register for credits and you don't get a degree. A true MIT education
is something where students come on campus, they live here, and they learn with fellow
students and with the faculty." More than ninety percent of the faculty and hundreds
of other MIT community members voluntarily share their knowledge and teaching materials
on OCW, demonstrating to the Institute's widely-held commitment to openness. "A core value of MIT
for a long time has been public service. We should be in the business of disseminating
this knowledge to help the world. In a sense, that's what books do, right. So this is, if
you want, is the modern equivalent of that." In the four years since the site's launch,
OpenCourseWare materials have been accessed by 35 million individuals from more than 220
countries and territories world-wide. Rogelio Morales, a PhD candidate at the Central University
of Venezuala, is a metalurgical engineer, and a license commercial diver. For Morales,
OCW is a valuable resource for new information that improves underwater inspections and testing.
"I often download information from different topics and give it to our professors. Sometimes
we discuss the information. Other times, they use the slides from the OCW site in class.
It's a great resource." "I want to be part of OCW because I believe in the spirit of
the thing. I think the concept is dead-on right, and we don't feel proprietary about
it. We want you to know what it is. We want you to be able to tap into it at some level,
even if it's a fairly static level. And that's reason enough to do it, as far as I'm concerned.
At the University of San Carlos, Guatemala's center of education for more than three hundred
years, Professor Waleska Aldana Segura teaches a course for physics instructors. "When you
try to teach certain subjects and you don't have labs or equipment or any kind of visualization,
the students end up lacking the expertise necessary for their future success as physics
professors. The fact that MIT provides the materials without cost is simply extraordinary."
"I think the most wonderful thing about this is that MIT was, in a way, almost, to most
people outside MIT, like the Forbidden City. They had no idea what happened inside. And
with OCW, the bridge was lowered. They now see MIT in a completely different way. Triatno
Yudo Harjoko, head of the architectural department at the University of Indonesia at Depok, was
amazed at the university as renowned as MIT would give access to virtually all of its
educational information Harjoko believes that there is great value in MIT's free and open
sharing. "It's not simply the information that's valuable, but also the glimpse OCW
offers into how MIT has structured its teaching and research." The reach of OpenCourseWare
goes far beyond the site itself. Other organizations have now translated nearly six hundred OCW
courses into other languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Thai. These translations
have been accessed by fourteen million visitors to date. There are also more than one hundred
mirror sites, locally hosted versions of the OCW site, in low-bandwidth areas. The majority
are located in sub-Saharan Africa. "I travel to Africa and I felt the people they were
very receptive to OCW, and the mission of OCW, which is to spread knowledge around the
world. Many of the universities in Africa don't have books or the budgets are really
low compared to the United States, and so whatever little help they can get with setting
up the curricula, or just more information about a subject - it really helps." "Another
area that many of us had an aspiration for was that OpenCourseWare would not be just
something that MIT does, but by setting an example and a model, it would become something
that many other institutions would also do. Not just in the areas that we are good at,
like science or engineering or management, but in all kinds of fields of knowledge. And
today that over two hundred and fifty university around the world who are doing their own OpenCourseWare.
And I think that the dream that, in fact, OpenCourseWare would be truly very very broad-based
movement that would impact knowledge, information and education worldwide - I think it's coming
to fruition even as we speak now. OpenCourseWare has grown from a bold experiment to a global
movement with the complete MIT curriculum now available on the site, OpenCourseWare
has reached an important milestone, but is only at the beginning of the journey. MIT
will continue to enhance and update OCW materials, develop new programs and features, and collaborate
with others seeking to share their own knowledge, helping to create a truly global network of
Open educational Resources. "I came from a family, in fact we were refugees in Hong Kong,
someone financially restricted, with very few options and when I grew up I remember
my father, valuing education, would bring home old second-, third-hand volumes of MIT
books. I remember flipping through these books, and seeing the dome, the picture of the dome
on the front cover, and just aspiring one day to go to MIT. And the fact that today
I'm a professor at MIT so forth, that's a testament to the fact that MIT has an impact
way behind its immediate borders. And I think that's at the heart, in some sense, of the
idea of OpenCourseWare. That institutions like MIT has a responsibility, has an opportunity,
to impact students way beyond our immediate walls in Cambridge. MIT OpenCourseWare: Unlocking
Knowledge, Empowering Minds.