MIT’s goal: Reach 1 billion with open courseware


Ninety-four percent of MIT students say they have accessed OpenCourseWare.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s free course content has reached 100 million people worldwide, and as U.S. campuses experiment with open class material to varying degrees, MIT hopes to increase OpenCourseWare’s reach to 1 billion learners by 2021.

MIT officials last month announced the goal to boost open content usage tenfold. April marked the 10th anniversary of the ambitious project to publish free material used in MIT classes on the internet.

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Lecture notes, course readings, syllabi, and exams from more than 2,000 MIT courses from 33 majors are available on the OpenCourseWare website. The program received $3.7 million during the 2011 fiscal year — $1.5 million from MIT’s operating budget and the rest from donations, grants, and contributions from 2010.

The cream of the open educational crop, however, will become even more widely used, said Cecilia d’Oliveira, executive director of MIT’s OpenCouseWare initiative.

Raising awareness of MIT’s free lessons, readings, and lectures will require more partnerships with some of the web’s most visited sites, she said. OpenCourseWare officials plan on posting more content to YouTube and iTunes U – two sites that net 2 million lecture video views from MIT every month – and embedding videos in Wikipedia entries.

“We want to get content to people wherever they are. There’s still a huge number of people who have never heard of OCW,” said d’Oliveira, who was recognized in 2010 by the Qatar Foundation’s World Innovation Summit for Education for her work in global educational innovation. “We feel on of our major accomplishment is getting higher education as a whole to look at sharing their content as a new and successful strategy.”

d’Oliveira said expanding the university’s OpenCourseWare initiative would involve mobile applications for smart phones and content translations into myriad languages that aren’t yet available.

Educational technology advocates who have pushed for greater access to free course material were abuzz in January after a University of California (UC) Irvine dean said open courseware would be commonplace throughout higher education by 2016.

“Everybody’s going to have to have some open material, just as they have libraries,” said Gary Matkin, UC Irvine’s dean of distance education and continuing learning. “There’s no stopping this movement. It’s happening.”

Like Matkin, d’Oliveira said the expansion of open courseware doesn’t mean every community college and research university from coast to coast will launch a massive effort like MIT’s OpenCourseWare project.

The student recruiting potential of free online content, she said, would be a driving factor for any campus that wants to stay competitive with peer institutions.

Campus IT officials and educational technology enthusiasts have convinced administrators that open courseware “is here to stay and that it’s a basic fundamental principle,” d’Oliveria said.

Some higher-education officials might embrace open content to keep pace with more technologically progressive schools.

“The pressure comes up when there’s a very positive response [to open content],” she said. “Then institutions want to climb on board.”

Fear that MIT’s precedence for offering free access to a top-rate education would be financially devastating for higher education were allayed after a 2010 Brigham Young University (BYU) study detailed open courseware’s recruiting potential.

Conducted by BYU’s Director of Independent Study Justin Johansen charged that open courseware won’t boost campus bottom lines, but the free web-based model isn’t the profit-sapping giveaway many have painted it to be.

BYU has six open classes—three college-level and three high school courses—that drew almost 14,000 web page visits over a four-month span, generating 445 paid enrollments at BYU.

The price to make the classes available ranged from $284 to $1,172 per course, according to Johansen’s study, meaning BYU’s open courseware had a 3.1-percent profit margin.

There are about 9,000 open courses available on the web—a generous educational technology offering not overlooked by incoming freshmen, according to an MIT analysis.

More than half of MIT freshmen said they were aware of the open content, according to the university, and 94 percent said they have accessed the online material.

“We did this not for our own benefit, but for the rest of the world,” d’Oliveria said. “[The OCW initiative] is consistent with the mission of an academic institution. … It’s what do we do: disseminate knowledge and preserve knowledge.”

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