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The great landmarks of higher education in the United States -- the establishment of land-grant colleges in the mid- 19th-century and the GI Bill at the close of World War II -- spread knowledge and opportunity across our landscape on an unprecedented scale. As we have progressed from World War II to the age of the World Wide Web, we have built a system of higher education that is the envy of the world, and we have developed the Internet as a universal medium for rapidly distributing and finding information.
Since the middle of the last century, graduates of our cutting- edge institutions have transformed the colleges and universities where they became faculty members by bringing with them the class notes, syllabi, and other materials they had used as students. They based their teaching on those materials -- shaping, expanding, and improving them to fit their new contexts and students. Today at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we plan to speed up that process to Internet time, by making the primary materials for nearly all of our 2,000 courses available on the World Wide Web, accessible to anyone anywhere in the world, through our OpenCourseWare initiative. A faculty member at a new engineering university in Ghana, a precocious high-school biology student in suburban Chicago, a political scientist in Poland, a literature professor in upstate New York, or an executive in a management seminar down the hall at MIT will all be able to use the materials our professors rely on in teaching our full-time students. Together they will build a web of knowledge that will enhance human learning worldwide.
That is the goal of MIT's OpenCourseWare.
Ten years from now, I expect that OCW will have become firmly planted in MIT's educational landscape. More important, it is my sincere hope that the idea will have taken root at many other universities and colleges around the world, and that they too will be supplying knowledge freely and openly to anyone, anywhere in the world.
I believe that we can achieve that goal within such a time frame. After all, it was...