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After five years, OpenCourseWare has a dedicated following - and many imitators. But it struggles with costs and copyriyhts.
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE TECHNOLOGY Prof. Hal Abelson and Phillip Greenspun have never met Kwadro Gyamfi Osafo-Maafo. They have never visited Ashesi University College or even set foot in Ghana. But Abelson and Greenspun might as well be standing on either side of Osafo-Maafo as he teaches Web Technologies in Ghana's capitan city, Accra. The syllabus he uses, the projects and readings he assigns, the lectures he presents, all are modeled at least in part on their MIT course, Software Engineering for Internet Applications. Osafo-Maafo thinks of Abelson and Greenspun as his mentors - the mentors he's never met.
The bridge that connects the American professors to a classroom 5,000 miles away from Cambridge, Mass., is MIT's OpenCourseWare. This mine of educational resources has in five years put 1,800 courses virtually the entire MIT curriculum - onto the Internet. Lecture notes, reading lists, quizzes, answers, assignments, syllabuses, slides, and a limited number of textbooks and videotaped lectures are freely offered to faculty, students, and anyone with a sense of curiosity anywhere in the world. The website, ocw.mit.edu, draws 15 million visits per year and has earned public praise from Bill Gates and from Margaret Spellings, the outgoing Bush administration secretary of education. The idea of OpenCourseWare "was absolutely revolutionary," says Catherine Casserly, director of Open Educational Resources at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, "and it has surpassed our wildest dreams."
Some educators believe that OpenCourseWare's greatest accomplishment is not the website itself but rather, what it has set in motion. Today, the open educational resources movement has seen more than a hundred universities around the world put course content online for free public use, many of them through the MIT-inspired OpenCourseWare Consortium. As OpenCourseWare's executive director, Cecilia d'Oliveira, says, "If MIT hadn't gone out on a limb and done this, it's hard to see that it would have caught on at such a level around the world."
Disturb the Universe
STILL, NO OTHER UNIVERSITY has even attempted an Internet project on the scale of MIT's, and d'Oliveira thinks she knows why: "It's very difficult." For example, each course is littered with copyright conflicts that must be...