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Case Study: MIT OpenCourseWare

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CSHE > Research > University Teaching as E-Business > Case Studies > MIT OpenCourseWare

NB: These draft case studies, compiled by Shannon Lawrence, are an internal resource for the University Teaching as E-business? research project. Originally released in October 2001, they were updated in March 2002. They were gathered from numerous sources, including news articles, press releases, scholarly reports, and company websites. In many cases, information presented herein was taken directly from The Chronicle of Higher Education's longitudinal series of articles on Information Technology and Distance Education, which represents the single best source for information about this evolving universe.

AT A GLANCE

(Updated information available below.)

Website: web.mit.edu/ocw/
E-learning model: content provider
Funding model: university non-profit
Leadership: Booz-Allen & Hamilton
Employees: 25-30 expected at start
Main Office: not stated, but likely on-campus in Cambridge
Revenue Streams: none
Funding Source: $11 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundations.
Profitability expected: none expected
Strengths: access to all MIT course content
Challenges: no degrees offered

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's bold initiative to make nearly all of its course materials used in the teaching of virtually all of MIT's courses available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. MIT's initial announcement of MIT OCW was made in April, 2001, and was greeted by an extraordinary outpouring of enthusiasm and excitement from around the world. MIT OCW has received initial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundations. MIT and the foundations that support it, believe that such a venture will continue the tradition at MIT and in American higher education of open dissemination of educational materials, philosophy, and modes of thought, and will help lead to fundamental changes in the way colleges and universities engage the web as a vehicle for education.

Products/Services

The OpenCourseWare project will begin as a large-scale pilot program over the next two years. The first steps include design of the software and services needed to support such a large endeavor, as well as protocols to monitor and assess its utilization by faculty and students at MIT and throughout the world.

MIT OCW is still in the very early stages of organization and course material is not yet available online. MIT plans to make materials available to the public beginning in 2002, with 500 courses available within two years. Over the next decade, the project expects to provide over 2000. MIT officials have not yet determined which course materials will be the first to go online, but they will encompass MIT's entire curriculum, including engineering, science, management, architecture and planning, and the humanities, arts and social sciences. Depending on the particular course or the style in which the course is taught, this could include material such as lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, and assignments for each course. A sampling of MIT course materials are online now, though these are not in OCW format.

MIT courses themselves will not be offered online. MIT OCW is not a distance learning initiative. Distance learning involves the active exchange of information between faculty and students, with the goal of obtaining some form of a credential. Increasingly, distance learning is also limited to those willing and able to pay for materials or course delivery. Rather, the goal of MIT OCW is to provide the content that supports an MIT education as a resource to people, particularly teachers, worldwide. Additionally, MIT will not award credit or grant degrees through MIT OpenCourseWare; however, faculty at colleges and universities around the world will have access to use these materials to develop new curricula and specific courses, and individual learners can draw upon the MIT OCW materials for self-study or supplementary use.

The MIT OCW website will be coherent in design but flexible enough to accommodate many different types of courses, lectures, seminars, etc. The design and searching capabilities will help users locate materials by discipline and subject area, type of materials, name of individual faculty or author, and type of instruction. No registration will be required to use the MIT OpenCourseWare materials. Once MIT OCW is up and running, it will be available free of charge to everyone. MIT's course materials will be made available only in English, though MIT OCW has expressed a willingness to have others to do translations as long as the original source is acknowledged. No policy has yet been developed.

The materials on the OCW site will be open and freely available worldwide for non-commercial purposes such as research and education, providing an extraordinary resource which others can adapt to their own needs. Some of the anticipated benefits are:

  • Faculty at colleges and universities around the world can use the OCW materials to develop new curricula and specific courses. These materials might be of particular value in developing countries that are trying to expand their higher education systems rapidly.
  • Individual learners could draw upon the materials for self-study or supplementary use.
  • The OCW infrastructure could serve as a model for other institutions that choose to make similar content open and available.
  • Over time, if other universities adopt this model, a vast collection of educational resources would develop and could facilitate widespread exchange of ideas about innovative ways to use those resources in teaching and learning.
  • Within MIT, OCW would serve as a common repository of information and a channel of intellectual activity that would stimulate educational innovation and cross-disciplinary educational ventures.

MIT OCW will radically alter technology-enhanced education at MIT, and will serve as a model for university dissemination of knowledge in the Internet age.

Governance/Management

Participation of MIT faculty in MIT OCW will be voluntary, so if a professor has concerns that publication of his or her course materials might hinder the publication of a book based on the course, for instance, the professor could choose not to put the course online. Over the past few months, leaders of the OCW project have interviewed M.I.T. faculty members to make sure professors would be willing to participate. Judging by the number of faculty who already actively utilize the web as part of their teaching, and the interest expressed by faculty, MIT expects that within 10 years, over 2000 MIT courses will be available on the MIT OCW website.

Resources will be available to provide teaching assistants and professional production support for developing and maintaining the MIT OCW website. MIT will commit to the continuous support of the MIT OCW educational environment. One MIT professor on the study group that helped formulate the OCW concept noted that the pioneering new program may set in motion innovations in teaching. Once students begin acquiring course content on the web, faculty will be able to pay more attention to the actual process of teaching.

The policies toward the intellectual property created for MIT OCW will be clear and consistent with other policies for scholarly material used in education. Faculty will retain ownership of most materials prepared for MIT OCW, following the MIT policy on textbook authorship. MIT will retain ownership only when significant use has been made of the Institute's resources. If student course work is placed on the MIT OCW site, then copyright in the work remains with the student.

Finance

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation have funded the first phase of MIT OCW. The $11 million in grants, $5.5 million from each foundation, will support MIT OCW through the 27-month, $12 million start-up and pilot phase of the project. The institute has also pledged to commit about $1 million of its own money to the effort. Much of the grant money will go toward hiring a staff of about 25 or 30 people devoted to supporting and maintaining the course Web sites. The project is now scheduled to last at least eight years, at a total cost of up to $100 million. The experience gained from the first phase will help determine the costs of the second phase, which is expected to take six years.

The foundations were both drawn to the project because of MIT's interest in providing free access to a high-caliber curriculum. "MIT's pledge to share its entire curriculum, and to place its entire institution behind this ambitious effort, could transform the way in which content is made available to all who want access to it. High school and college students, faculty, and college graduates and professionals worldwide will be able to learn from the offerings of one of the world's great universities," said William G. Bowen, president of the Mellon Foundation.

Paul Brest, president of the Hewlett Foundation, also stated that "Our hope is that this project will inspire similar efforts at other institutions and will reinforce the concept that ideas are best viewed as the common property of all of us, not as proprietary products intended to generate profits."

MIT officials noted that market opportunities do exist for MIT, and will probably have some role at MIT in the future; however, the OpenCourseWare project is not concerned with generating revenue. "OpenCourseWare looks counter-intuitive in a market driven world. It goes against the grain of current material values. But it really is consistent with what I believe is the best about MIT. It is innovative. It expresses our belief in the way education can be advanced -- by constantly widening access to information and by inspiring others to participate," said Charles M. Vest, president of MIT. Other opportunities do exist, though. "There's the possibility of developing courses in the humanities or the arts, for example, for retirees or for people who have wanted to go back to school for a long time. A lot of opportunities are out there to make money. But I want to emphasize that there is no commercially available MIT degree," President Vest declared.

MIT has not ruled out the possibility, however, of licensing its online course materials to for-profit institutions, which might be interested in putting them in products or courses. If a for-profit company wanted to offer a course that primarily used materials from the M.I.T. OpenCourseWare project, for instance, the company would probably be asked to pay a licensing fee, according to Steven R. Lerman, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who is part of the team organizing the project. "But we would not do that if the condition was that we could no longer make [the material] free and open. We're not going to pull it off the site because someone's going to pay us," he said.

Strategy

The concept of MIT OpenCourseWare was born from deliberations of a study group chartered by MIT's Council on Educational Technology. The Council, a group of educational leaders from throughout MIT, asked the study group to consider ways to use Internet technology to enhance education within MIT as well as MIT's influence on education on a global scale. The group was composed of faculty and staff from MIT, and was assisted by consultants from Booz-Allen & Hamilton, who are helping with organizational aspects of the project.

The program will continue the tradition of MIT's leadership in educational innovation, as exemplified by the engineering science revolution in the 1960s. At that time, MIT engineering faculty radically revised their curricula and produced new textbooks that brought the tools of modern science, mathematics, and computing into the core of the engineering curriculum. As their students joined the engineering faculties of universities throughout the country, they took with them their own course notes from MIT, and spread the new approach to engineering education.

In similar spirit, but with new technologies, MIT OpenCourseWare will make it possible to quickly disseminate new knowledge and educational content in a wide range of fields. President Vest commented that the idea of OpenCourseWare is particularly appropriate for a research university such as MIT, where ideas and information move quickly from the laboratory into the educational program, even before they are published in textbooks.

MIT is also undertaking a number of ambitious projects to enhance and potentially transform the educational experience through the use of new technologies. These projects are stimulated and supported by MIT's Council on Educational Technology and by Project I-Campus, a collaboration between MIT and Microsoft Research.

  • TEAL: The TEAL Project will establish a technology enabled active learning environment for large enrollment physics courses, which will serve as a national model for such instruction. Building on the experience of other universities, TEAL will merge lectures, recitations, and hands-on laboratory experience into a technologically and collaboratively rich experience. Software and teaching materials developed in this effort will be made available nationally at little or no cost, in the hopes of motivating a national effort along these lines.
  • WebLab: MIT students can now test and probe fragile, microscopic electronic structures via a novel online lab that can be accessed from dorm rooms and other locations 24 hours a day. Although the lab's focus is the study of microelectronic devices, WebLab has the potential to revolutionize science and engineering education by providing online access to state-of-the-art labs.
  • ArchNet: The ArchNet project is based on the idea that educational technology should be employed to create and enhance learning communities. All community members will have individual workspaces in ArchNet which provide them with personalized entry points to the system, and which also allow them to represent themselves and their work to other members of the community. Learning community environments of this sort will be very widely used in professional education in the coming years.

MIT is also engaged in several collaborative and distance learning projects around the world. In the future the technologies that are being developed to support these efforts will also be utilized to enhance OCW materials. Some of these projects include:

  • MIT's Design Studio of the Future (DSOF): The DSOF is an interdisciplinary effort between the School of Architecture and Planning and the School of Engineering that focuses on geographically distributed electronic design and work group collaboration. As a design project moves along, aspects of the work can be shared, discussed, changed, and implemented through electronic means.
  • MIT-Singapore Alliance: In November 1998, MIT joined in an alliance with the two leading research universities in Singapore -- the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University -- to explore the application of information technology in the creation of a new global model for long-distance engineering education and collaborative research.
  • MIT's System Design and Management Program (SDM): MIT's first degree granting program offered through distance education, SDM provides students with expertise in both management sciences and engineering, specifically in the areas of system design and new product development.
  • Cambridge-MIT Institute: This is a new enterprise between MIT and Cambridge University in England that will develop educational and research programs designed to stimulate the development of new technologies, to encourage entrepreneurship, and to improve productivity and competitiveness. A key component will be an undergraduate student exchange program.

MIT President Vest said, "We see MIT OpenCourseWare as opening a new door to the powerful, democratizing and transforming power of education." MIT OCW will serve as a model for university dissemination of knowledge in the Internet age, and will continue the tradition at MIT and in American higher education of open dissemination of educational materials, philosophy and modes of thought. MIT OCW is fundamentally an information dissemination initiative. "Simply put, OpenCourseWare is a natural marriage of American higher education and the capabilities of the World Wide Web," he said.

MIT believes that implementation of OpenCourseWare will complement and stimulate innovation in ways that may not even be envisioned at this point. "This is about something bigger than MIT. I hope other universities will see us as educational leaders in this arena, and we very much hope that OpenCourseWare will draw other universities to do the same. We would be delighted if -- over time -- we have a world wide web of knowledge that raises the quality of learning -- and ultimately, the quality of life -- around the globe," asserted MIT President Vest.

Update (February 2002)

OCW began its pilot phase in December 2001 to find out what professors want from course web pages and to create a system for support and maintenance of the pages. Early efforts have proven that faculty skill levels vary substantially. MIT is hiring support staff and developing templates and search tools that will make the on-line course materials easier for all users. The pilot phase is schedule to end in March 2002.

References
 

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