MIT OpenCourseWare

Abstract

[Visited May'07] MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a Web-based electronic publishing initiative funded jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MIT, and Ab Initio software company. OCW's goal is to provide free, searchable access to MIT's course materials. This site will be useful for faculty and students who could use the course information for additional ideas, inspiration, or reading lists.

13 44-6573 [Internet Resource]

MIT OpenCourseWare

URL: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/

[Visited May'07] MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a Web-based electronic publishing initiative funded jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MIT, and Ab Initio software company. OCW's goal is to provide free, searchable access to MIT's course materials. This site will be useful for faculty and students who could use the course information for additional ideas, inspiration, or reading lists. Also, people not affiliated with academic institutions could use these online courses to guide their own learning. With 1,550 courses published from across the curriculum, most students and scholars will find something of interest. Courses from 35 departments across MIT's five schools are represented in OCW. They include, for example, "Feminist Political Thought," "Environmental Struggles," "Writing about Race," and "Victorian Literature and Culture," along with offerings such as "Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism with an Experimental Focus," "Infinite Random Matrix Theory," and "Computational Quantum Mechanics of Molecular and Extended Systems."

OCW provides users with open access to the syllabi, lecture notes, course calendars, problem sets and solutions, exams, and reading lists. Additionally video lectures are available with many courses. MIT plans to include materials from almost all of its courses by 2008, and is working with organizations that are translating OCW course materials into Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese. The site is attractive and navigation is easy. Users may download complete courses as ZIP files, which allows them to work offline or with low bandwidth. The site does ask for donations to support the project, though there is no advertising. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above.-J. P. Renaud, University of Miami