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March 19, 2006
How MIT's Open CourseWare is growing
We love to talk about the Massachusettes Institute of Technology's Open CourseWare project because it's a big idea meant to change the world. And change-the-world ideas inspire evangelism.
If you're not familiar with Open Courseware, back in 2001 MIT decided to make its entire curriculum -- 1,800 undergrad and graduate courses -- freely available on the Internet. That's a $104,000 value to a degreed student.
Why would one of the world's top learning institutions give away its intellectual property?
Because an institute committee tasked with studying the impact of the Internet in 1999 decided that the best way to advance an MIT-style education would be to widen access to information. By making access free, the widening of access would spread exponentially via word of mouth through multiple networks. An education virus, if you will.
Anne Margulies, who is the project's director, told an audience in Missouri last month that MIT has learned quite a lot by making its professors' course work freely available. Andy Carvin recorded her presentation and uploaded it to his blog as an MP3 file; I have compiled notes from listening to Andy's recording.
How it works
* MIT "publishes" course materials twice per year, and 300 courses arrive in each publication; 1,265 courses are currently available.
* Each faculty member decides on the amount of content to share; Margulies says her group finds it difficult to keep up with the growing levels of content shared by faculty.
How it's used
* 80% of courses contain professors' lecture notes, which users say they value the most.
* The course materials have been voluntarily translated into 15 languages.
* More than one million people visit the Open Courseware site every month.
* Educators from other institutions report they are using MIT's accessible courses as benchmarks and standards against which to measure their own courses.
* It's brought faculty closer: Two, 30-year MIT faculty members had never met nor were they aware they were teaching work that was similar until the Courseware project led them to discover one another.
How it's valued
* MIT alumni hated the Open Courseware idea initially because they thought it would devalue their degree; that resistance changed because the project allows them free access to continuing education.
* Students who enroll formally at MIT are saying that Open Courseware was what first attracted them to the institution and gave them an idea of what to expect in intellectual rigor and homework. In other words, it turns out to be a great try-before-you-buy program.
One of the less-quantifiable aspects of MIT's project is the unprecedented expressions of enthusiasm of its fans. Indeed, Margulies says "It's truly overwhelming to receive the amount of fan mail we receive every day (over 10,000 emails so far). Some 90 percent of the email we receive is to thank us for sharing MIT's content... and we respond to every single message."
Anything of significant value, like MIT's intellectual property, is certain to spread quickly, especially if given away freely. In a future post, I'll explore ideas how businesses can apply the principles underlying Open Courseware as a marketing strategy.
Technorati Tags: MIT, Open_Courseware, Open_source, Evangelism, Word_of_mouth
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» MIT Courses from GroundBuzz
Church of the Customer post the results of the great MIT Open CourseWare experiment whereby MIT publishes professor lectures notes, assignments, tests, etc from over 1500 MIT Classes for the world to read and use for themselves - available under a Crea... [Read More]
I have been looking through these classes & working on them whenever I can for about a year now. Some of these are just excellent & there are discussion forums too. I don't find the discussions forums as useful because I have had trouble activating my account & I usually pick classes that benefit me but few other people choose. I am very thankful that there are people in the world who choose to fund things like this.
In addition to this, I take other classes by correspondence & occasionally do classes through Barnes & Noble's Online University.
MIT is great, it have the one of best education materials in the world, unlike much greedy universities that has expensive university fee, this organization a willing to put the courses for free. Many in this world can benefit on it. :)
I don’t ready know why people are bad mouthing MIT, the thing is even if they put it on the internet not everyone know where to start and how to go about learning the materials.
Since the lecture is not next with you when you learn the materials, so learning the materials would not be that easy. However by making everything free at least they are doing some good for most people, especially people who can not effort to go to university.
Anyway education should be free in the first place, it is just some greedy people like to make people paid a lot of money for it. :(
