MIT Courses Are Going Online (Free!)

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Article confirmed at: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/ocw.html

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No Net Profit: MIT Courses Are Going Online (Free!)

Carey Goldberg New York Times Service Thursday, April 5, 2001

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts Other universities may be striving to market their courses to the Internet masses in hopes of dot-com wealth.

But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has chosen the opposite path: to post virtually all its course materials on the Web, free to everybody. MIT announced on Wednesday a 10-year initiative, apparently the biggest of its kind, which aims to create public Web sites for almost all of its 2,000 courses, and to post materials like lecture notes, problem sets, syllabuses, exams, simulations, even video lectures. Professors' participation will be voluntary, but the university is committing itself to post sites for all its courses, at a cost of up to $100 million.

Charles Vest, the president of MIT, said the giveaway idea came in a "traditional Eureka moment" as the institute - like nearly every other university - brainstormed and soul-searched about how best to take advantage of the Internet.

Called OpenCourseWare, the initiative found broad resonance among the faculty members, said Steven Lerman, the faculty chairman.

"Selling content for profit, or trying in some ways to commercialize one of the core intellectual activities of the university," Professor Lerman said, "seemed less attractive to people at a deep level than finding ways to disseminate it as broadly as possible."

Universities have been flocking into "distance learning" - offering courses online to off-campus paying students - and commercial ventures have been investing tens of millions in the idea. But those ventures tend to pick and choose among courses and professors, rather than trying to offer a whole university in one swoop.

At the same time, on campus, universities have begun creating a great many course Web sites. The University of California at Los Angeles creates a site for every undergraduate course. But those are generally only for internal use, and the MIT initiative, which offers no credit to visitors of the site, appears to dwarf even those internal programs.

"I think everybody else besides MIT is in the position of being more cautious," and watching to see what Internet strategy works best, said David Brady, vice provost for learning technologies at Stanford University.

A software entrepreneur from the Washington area, Michael Saylor, pledged $100 million of his own money to create an online free university a year ago, but the plan called for building it from scratch, and the value of his stock has plummeted. MIT's plan is different from Mr. Saylor's, Mr. Vest said, in that, "for one thing, it's going to happen."

Another difference between the MIT plan and other Internet initiatives is that it makes no attempt to offer full-fledged, for-credit courses online. Rather, it will offer course materials as ingredients of learning that can be combined with teacher-student interaction somewhere else - or simply explored by, say, professors in Chile or precocious high school students in Bangladesh.

Still, is the institute not worried that students will balk at paying about $26,000 a year in MIT tuition when they can get all their materials online?

"Absolutely not," Mr. Vest said. "Our central value is people and the human experience of faculty working with students in classrooms and laboratories, and students learning from each other, and the kind of intensive environment we create in our residential university.

"I don't think we are giving away the direct value, by any means, that we give to students," he said. "But I think we will help other institutions around the world."

Most of the 940 faculty members support the plan, Professor Lerman and others said, but some have reservations. Some argued that the institute would be giving away a valuable asset that could be used to subsidize the residential students.

The question of whether university knowledge can be turned into online gold remains a big one, however; most firms that are trying it, Mr. Vest said, have encountered "much rougher sailing" than expected. Other faculty skeptics questioned whether it would be a good use of professors' time to labor over Web sites, and others have questioned whether sub-par Web sites might not end up reflecting badly on the institution.

Then there is the question of intellectual property, already a thorny one in academia as the promise of Internet riches exacerbates the question of who owns the electronic rights to a professor's lectures and research. But Professor Lerman and others said that issues of intellectual property had surfaced little in the months of faculty discussion of the initiative. Rather, they said, a willingness, even an eagerness, to share appeared to dominate.

"This is a natural fit to what the Web is really all about," Mr. Vest said. "We've learned this lesson over and over again. You can't have tight, closed-up systems. We've tried to open up software infrastructure in a variety of ways, and that's what unleashed the creativity of software developers; I think the same thing can happen in education."

In fact, MIT is a hotbed of the "open-source" software movement; and this new Internet initiative is based on a similar idea, according to Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science and engineering who is involved in both.

"Fundamentally, they proceed from the same ethic, which has to do with sharing," he said. "In the Middle Ages people built cathedrals, where the whole town would get together and make a thing that's greater than any individual person could do and the society would kind of revel in that. We don't do that as much anymore, but in a sense this is kind of like building a cathedral."

The initiative is to begin with a two-year pilot program to put materials from more than 500 courses on the Web. Mr. Vest said he did not rule out the possibility that MIT might seek to develop profit-oriented Web programs in the future.

www.iht.com/articles/15891.htm

-- Bandrui (Bandrui@ever.learning), April 05, 2001

Answers

No wonder Ars Digita is going broke.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), April 05, 2001.

Amazing. Hip, Hip MIT.

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), April 05, 2001.

I think they were following what some other universities have done. Last semester, I had a math prof [I think the class was Matrix Theory] who mumbled the explanations and scribbled problems on the board that were illegible to me even though I sat in the first row. I found complete lectures from a university professor in Matrix on the web which followed my text almost perfectly. This guy included examples, detailed solutions, pre-tests, etc. SOME universities provide these sites for their students only, but others have been providing curricula material for several years now, available to anyone.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), April 06, 2001.

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