Abstract:
In 2001 then-president of MIT, Dr. Charles Vest, announced that MIT will launch OpenCourseWare (OCW). The idea is simple. Through OCW, MIT will publish on the web the teaching materials from each of the approximately 2,000 undergraduate and graduate courses it teaches. OCW is free and open to anyone with a browser. Today, we already have 1,400 courses, so we are well on our way to fulfilling the promise of all MIT courses being on OCW. The 1,400 courses represent 70% of the faculty, who participate in OCW on a voluntary basis. Each month, the MIT OCW site receives over 1 million visits from every continent in the world (even Antarctica!), making it one of the most popular education destinations on the web. Recently, other universities around the world have begun their own OCW, marking a trend that, according to a UNESCO official, is unstoppable. One prominent effort in this regard is Japan OCW Consortium, consisting of some of the top universities in Japan (). A similar effort is underway in China with the China Open Resource for Education (CORE) and in countries in Europe and South America. Ultimately, we hope to link all the OCW sites into a global high quality educational content network available freely and openly to anyone who wants to use it. At the moment there are parts of the world where Internet connection is not readily available. In sub-Saharan Africa, we have installed mirror sites (hard drives loaded with the OCW content) and have sent teams of students to assist with the installation and use of the program. I have supervised students who went to Kenya, Cameroon, Rwanda, and Zambia. An early model for OCW is MIT's JPNET (jpnet.mit.edu), which I started in 1994 to put the entire MIT Japanese language program on the Internet, to see what this new technology can do for education. JPNET fundamentally changed the way the Japanese language instructors carry out in-class activities. Equally important is that what we learned from JPNET carried over directly to OCW nearly ten years later. |