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In April, representatives of more than 200 universities from around the world gathered in Dalian, China, to move forward their efforts to create a global body of freely accessible course materials spanning both cultures and disciplines. These institutions have committed to freely and openly sharing on the Web the core teaching materials - including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams - from the courses they offer to their enrolled students. Through the OpenCourseWare consortium, universities from Japan, Spain, Korea, France, Turkey, Vietnam, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States - plus dozens from China - have already published the materials from over 6,200 courses. In a world of increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws and intensifying competition to provide for-profit Web services, this movement stands in stark contrast to prevailing trends. The story of this OpenCourseWare movement illustrates how novel thinking and a commitment to addressing global challenges can produce remarkable results.
MIT OpenCourseWare
The OpenCourseWare movement has its roots in New England. The concept emerged in 2000 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where then-President Charles Vest charged a faculty committee with answering two questions: "How is the Internet going to change education?" and "What should MIT do about it?" These questions were put to the committee at the height of the dot-com bubble, when a number of MIT's peer institutions were already launching high-profile distance learning ventures. It was widely expected that the committee would recommend a similar approach for MIT.
The committee found they were unable to develop a business model that would allow MIT to compete successfully in the online environment, however. MIT is a relatively small school, with approximately ten thousand students and a thousand faculty. MIT is also very residentially focused, with a strong emphasis on interactive and hands-on learning across the institute. Because it would be very expensive, and probably detrimental to the curriculum, to convert these residential materials to online materials for wide distribution, the committee found itself without a clear answer to the questions posed by President Vest.
In addition, the faculty were seeking an approach that would...