The OpenCourseWare Story: New England Roots, Global Reach

Abstract

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. Highlights for High School (ocw.mit. edu/highschool) lists around seventy introductory courses with content an advanced high school student might find approachable; further, the portal maps more than 2,600 individual video and print learning resources from the advanced placement curricula for physics, calculus and biology; and finally, the portal links to OCW materials selected to inspire the study of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects, including engaging demonstrations and competitions.

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 address the growing pressures faced by educational systems around the world as more students competed for limited educational resources. At this point the committee decided that they might be able to take what MIT does best residential education - and combine it with the Internet's strength - wide and low-cost distribution of content - to generate a significant global benefit. Rather than creating expensive new materials to support online learning, why not use the Internet to distribute the course materials that MIT was already creating for classroom use?

The faculty proposed the concept, which they dubbed OpenCourseWare (OCW), in the fall of 2000. President Vest recognized the power of the idea immediately. He began seeking funding and initiated a series of discussions within the MIT community about the concept. By April 2001, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation had committed to funding the initial phases of the program, and consensus had emerged from the MIT community that the Institute should publish materials from all courses offered. The project was announced on the front page of The New York Times on April 4, 2001.

MIT moved quickly to build a team to execute the project, and launched a proof-of-concept site with materials from 50 courses in September 2002, which generated an overwhelmingly positive response. Since then, MIT has published materials from approximately 400-500 courses annually. Today, the MIT OpenCourseWare site (ocw.mit .edu) contains virtually all of MIT's curriculum, including the syllabi and reading lists from 1,800 courses, notes from more than 15,000 lectures, 9,000 problem sets, and 900 exams. The site also contains 25 courses with complete video-recorded lectures, and numerous complete texts, simulations and animations, samples of code and other learning tools.

Response has far exceeded expectations. As of April 2008, more than 22 million individuals from around the world have come to the OCW site. Translations of OCW content by other organizations have been visited by an additional 18 million individuals. The site has proven to be a useful resource for educators at other institutions, who are about fifteen percent of the OCW audience, and to students at other schools, who comprise an additional thirty percent of OCW visitors. The big surprise to the ?GG community was that fully half of the visitors to the site are not affiliated with a university at all, but are instead a mix of working professionals keeping their skills sharp, individuals enjoying the opportunity to broaden their horizons, adults transitioning back in to formal education, and other independent learners.

With the complete MIT curriculum on the site, the OCW team has turned its attention to updating course materials and developing new services on top of this unique resource. The first of such services was launched in November 2007. Highlights for High School (ocw.mit. edu/highschool) lists around seventy introductory courses with content an advanced high school student might find approachable; further, the portal maps more than 2,600 individual video and print learning resources from the advanced placement curricula for physics, calculus and biology; and finally, the portal links to OCW materials selected to inspire the study of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects, including engaging demonstrations and competitions.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium

As remarkable as the MIT OpenCourseWare story is, it is fast becoming a small part of a much larger story. Shortly after the site was launched with 500 courses in September 2003, MIT was contacted by numerous institutions in the US and abroad who were inspired by the MIT example. The MIT faculty recognized that the OpenCourseWare concept would not truly change higher education unless it was a practice shared widely by institutions around the globe, and so the OCW team was charged with assisting other schools in launching OCW projects.

In the United States, schools with a strong sense of global mission including Tufts University, John Hopkins University (Bloomberg School of Public Health), University of Notre Dame, and Utah State University - began work on their own OpenCourseWare sites. Internationally, strong interest emerged in Japan, China, Spain and France, with coalitions of schools coming together to share their own content or to translate the MTT content. By early 2005, the MIT OpenCourseWare team invited representatives of these schools to the MIT campus to discuss the formation of the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

The mission of the consortium was established as advancing education and empowering people through OpenCourseWare. Starting with an initial group of 17 members, the consortium has expanded rapidly in the past three years to include more than 200 universities worldwide. About half of those currently have course materials available on OpenCourseWare sites that the institutions host. In April 2006, the OpenCourseWare consortium launched a portal (ocwconsortium.org) linking these sites together and providing users with a cross-site search. The body of materials available through the consortium now includes content from schools as diverse as the Open University UK, Keio University (Japan), University of Southern Queensland (Australia), University of CaliforniaBerkeley, Universidad de Monterrey (Mexico), Korea University, Delft University of Technology (Netherlands), and Beijing Jiaotong University (China).

Alongside the OpenCourseWare movement, a wider movement dedicated to sharing open educational resources (OER) has emerged, making available a range of educational resources and open source tools such as the Sakai and Moodle learning management platforms, open access journals and textbooks, learning objects and more. The Hewlett Foundation has played a central role in fostering the wider OER movement, and more information about the OER movement is available on the Hewlett Web site (www.hewlett.org/Programs/ Education/OER/).

OpenCourseWare in New England The global OpenCourseWare movement has its roots in New England, and the region promises to be a leader well into the future. New England not only boasts the flagship OCW project at MIT, but the Tufts OpenCourseWare site (ocw.tufts.edu), a recently launched OCW site at the University of Massachusetts-Boston (ocw.umb.edu/), Yale University's Open Yale Courses (open.yale.edu/courses/), and a project underway at Wheelock College. Even with these significant contributions, the potential in New England is far from tapped. As global interest in OpenCourseWare continues to grow, New England promises to be a key source of open educational material for many years to come.