CHAPTER ONE
1.0.
INTRODUCTION.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, the yearning for an internet based
platform where course materials can be accessed by university faculty, students and the
general public became very pronounced in academic circles. The proponents of this
medium; later known as “Open Course Ware”, based their rationale on the need for a
course-specific source of academic materials that would address academic needs
differently from online libraries and distance learning websites. These lead to the
launching of an Open Course Ware (OCW) by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in October 2002. The university, having being at the forefront of the Open Course
Ware movement, was the first to launch an Open Course Ware on the internet.
1.1.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university
located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The university has five schools and
one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on
scientific and technological research.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded by William Barton
Rogers in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, the
university adopted the German university model and emphasized laboratory instruction
from an early date. Its current 168 acre campus opened in 1916 and extends about
1.6 kilometres along the northern bank of the Charles River basin.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been ranked among the top ten
universities of the world for several decades. MIT presently has 10,220 students with
postgraduate students accounting for about sixty percent of this figure. MIT researchers
were involved in efforts to develop computers, radar, and inertial guidance in connection
with defense research during the second World War. In the past sixty years, MIT's
educational programs have expanded beyond the physical sciences and engineering into
social sciences like economics, philosophy, linguistics, political science, and
management.
1
1.2.
OpenCourseWare (OCW).
OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term applied to course materials created by
universities and shared freely with the world via the internet. The OpenCourseWare
movement began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the launch of MIT
OpenCourseWare in October 2002. Since then, other universities like Utah State
University, Tuft University and Delft University have also created OpenCourseWare
projects.
An Open Course Ware project is a free and open digital publication of high
quality educational materials, organized as courses that are made available for use and
adaptation under an open license. Open Course Ware is usually made available to the
public for no cost and does not provide certification or access to instructors.
OpenCourseWare is seen in academic circles as an effort to combine the openness
of a public library with the academic intensity of a university, it combines world class
research and world class teaching with the World Wide Web. OpenCourseWare is
envisioned as a way to narrow the digital divide, to help educators in developing
countries to ramp up their curricula, and to assist students and self-learners who could not
afford to attend or meet the entrance requirements for a world class education.
Evidently, OpenCourseWare has come to stay. Considering the revolutionary
effect this medium is having on the dissemination of high quality education to developed
and developing nations alike, it could be asserted that the enormous amount of financial
resources invested into the scheme and the potential profit ignored by the universities
involved in OpenCourseWare projects have not been expended in vain.
2
CHAPTER TWO
2.0
Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an
initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational
materials from its undergraduate and graduate level courses online, free and openly
available to anyone, anywhere, by the end of the year 2007. MIT OpenCourseWare can
be considered as a large-scale, web-based publication of MIT course materials. The
project was announced in October 2002. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) can be accessed on the internet at http://ocw.mit.edu
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is
jointly funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The initiative has
encouraged a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as
open educational resources. (Wikipedia 2009)
As of November 2007, over 1800 MIT courses were available online. While a few
of these are limited to chronological reading lists and discussion topics, a majority
provided homework problems and examinations, often with solutions and lecture notes.
Some courses also include interactive web demonstrations, complete textbooks written by
MIT professors, and streaming video lectures.
As of August 2008, of the over 1800 courses available, only 26 included complete
video lectures, and not all of these have complete lecture notes. The lack of lecture notes
makes it difficult to follow some lectures, for example, when the lecturer is referring to
slides being projected in the lecture hall. The selection of available courses is somewhat
incomplete. For example, prerequisite classes for a given course are frequently not
available. However, the quality of those courses which include complete materials is very
high, and many of the lecturers are extremely compelling. The video is available in
3
streaming mode, but may also be downloaded for viewing offline, though the procedure
for downloading is not explicitly given.
The MIT OCW is seen by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a means
to assist students and self-learners who could not afford to attend or meet the entrance
requirements for an MIT education. Not only does MIT want the outside world to utilize
its OpenCourseWare, but it also wants the revolution to spread and for other institutions
around the world to adopt OpenCourseWare for their own courses.
2.1
History of MIT OpenCourseWare
In the year 1999, MIT provost, Robert Brown charged the MIT Council on
Education Technology with the responsibility of determining how MIT should position
itself in the distance learning and e-learning environment. The MIT OpenCourseWare
was then initiated to provide a new model for the dissemination of knowledge and
collaboration among scholars around the world. The project was spearheaded by Hal
Abelson and other MIT Faculty. (S. Eppinger 2009)
In late 2000, the MIT Council on Educational Technology, in response to the
provost’s request, introduced a plan to open their course content to the rest of the world at
no cost. Charles Vest, who was MIT’s president at that time, was astounded at the
proposition, but eventually bought the idea. Considering the profit earning e-learning
provisions that were being launched by other universities, Charles Vest assumed that the
MIT faculty would propose a distance learning venture that would be income
generating.(Kirkpatrick .K. 2006)
In September 2002, the MIT OpenCourseWare proof of concept pilot site opened
to the public, offering 32 courses. In September 2003, MIT OpenCourseWare published
its 500th course, including some courses with complete streaming video lectures. By
September 2004, 900 MIT courses were available online. As of November 2007, over
1800 MIT courses were available on the MIT OpenCourseWare. The response from MIT
faculty and students has been very positive and MIT OpenCourseWare is seen as being
consistent with MIT's mission to advance knowledge and educate students in science,
4
technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the American nation and
the world in the 21st century and is true to MIT's values of excellence, innovation, and
leadership.
In 2005, MIT OpenCourseWare and other leading open educational resources
projects formed the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which seeks to extend the reach and
impact of open course materials, foster new open course materials and develop
sustainable models for open course material publication.
2.2
Technology used in publishing the MIT OpenCourseWare.
For the pilot phase, which ended in September 2003, the Web pages of the MIT
OCW site were built using HTML. Utilizing Web content editors such as Dream Weaver,
a team of programmers from MIT and the Sapient Corp, a business and development
consulting firm, designed and built the first 32 subjects. However, that model was not
scalable for hundreds of courses, so MIT OpenCourseWare has implemented a Content
Management System (CMS) in order to achieve MIT OCW's long-term publishing goals.
(J.P. Potts 2007)
The Content Management System which has been in use since the beginning of
2003 is a customized commercial option, Microsoft Content Management System 2002.
The reasons for the choice of Microsoft 2002 were manifold: Microsoft made a serious
commitment to the MIT OCW project, the total cost of ownership of Microsoft CMS
2002 was significantly lower than the other vendors in consideration, and the Microsoft
product offered a high-level of usability for the end-users, MIT OCW’s faculty liaisons
and MIT’s faculty. (J.P. Potts 2007)
The entire MIT OCW Web site is now published dynamically out of the
customized CMS. Embedded in the course sites are a number of file types, including
Adobe Acrobat PDF files, Java Applets, Shockwave, Real Player, Java, and MATLAB.
All of these applications are easily downloaded from the MIT OCW Technical
Requirements page. (J.P. Potts 2007)
5
2.3
Characteristics and Features of the MIT OpenCourseWare
The MIT OpenCourseWare is free for all users and does not require any form of
registration. All persons willing to use the MIT OCW are simply required to access the
MIT OCW website and navigate to the course or materials of their choice. These
materials are made available in different format; choice of download format will be
dependent on the user’s preference. The MIT OCW is be presently made available in
about 10 languages, including Spanish, Portuguese German, Mongolian, Vietnamese, and
Ukrainian.
The MIT OpenCourseWare differs from other Web-based education offerings in
that it is free and open, because of its depth and breadth, and because it takes an
institutional approach to online course publication. 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.
MIT OCW is not meant to replace degree-granting higher education or for credit
courses. Rather, the goal is to provide the content that supports an education. Many
individual faculty members at MIT and other universities already use the Web
extensively to make standard course materials available to their students. Some colleges
and universities now require a Website for every class. But, to a large extent, these Web
sites are designed for, and access is only provided to, the students enrolled at these
institutions. MIT OCW is an unprecedented institutional effort of a much broader
magnitude, as the goal is to provide the course materials free and open to the world.
Contents and materials gotten from the MIT OCW are not for commercial use.
Commercial use would involve the assessment of a direct or indirect fee by a for-profit
entity for use of the MIT OCW materials, or any derivation or modification of the MIT
OCW material, or any other commercial exploitation of MIT OCW materials. All uses,
reuse, and distribution of MIT OCW material, including works derived from MIT OCW
material, must be attributed to MIT and to the original faculty authors where identified on
the MIT OCW materials.
6
2.4
Rules guiding the use of MIT OpenCourseWare
The underlying premise and purpose of MIT OpenCourseWare is to make course
materials used in MIT courses freely and openly available to others for non-commercial
educational purposes. Through MIT OCW, MIT grants the right to anyone to use the
materials, either as it is or in a modified form. There is no restriction on how a user can
modify the materials for the user’s purpose. Materials may be edited, translated,
combined with someone else's materials, reformatted, or changed in any other way.
However, there are three requirements that an MIT OCW user must meet to use the
materials:
1. Non-commercial: Use of MIT OCW materials is open to all except for profit-making
entities who charge a fee for access to educational materials.
2. Attribution: Any and all use or reuse of the material, including use of derivative works
(new materials that incorporate or draw on the original materials), must be attributed to
MIT and, if a faculty member's name is associated with the material, to that person as
well.
3. Share alike : Any publication or distribution of original or derivative works, including
production of electronic or printed class materials or placement of materials on a Web
site, must offer the works freely and openly to others under the same terms that MIT
OCW first made the works available to the user.
2.5
Challenges encountered in the implementation of the MIT OpenCourseWare
The main challenge encountered in implementing the MIT OCW initiative was
not resistance on the part of some members of the MIT faculty, as presumed by many, but
rather, the logistical challenges presented by determining ownership and obtaining
publication permission for the massive amount of intellectual property items that are
embedded in the course materials of MIT's faculty, in addition to the time and technical
effort required to convert the educational materials to an online format.
7
CHAPTER THREE
3.0
ACADEMIC RELEVANCE OF THE MIT OCW
As of late 2007, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has made the
content of over 1800 of its undergraduate and graduate courses freely available online on
its OpenCourseWare website. Anyone with an Internet connection has access to lecture
notes, assignments, examinations and sometimes videos of the lectures. Anyone can reuse
or reorganize the material for their own purposes. When MIT first proposed the program
in 2000, it was still very unusual for academic institutions to openly share information
online, whatever information was available was hard to find or hidden behind paid
subscriptions. (Amsen. E. 2008)
Currently more than one hundred higher education institutions worldwide
participate in OpenCourseWare, but MIT is still the front runner; they have put more
course materials online than any other university. It's not unusual these days for a course
coordinator to run a course website with the syllabus and assignments. They might even
post class notes after the respective lectures. These websites are meant purely for students
who are enrolled in the course, and are sometimes only accessible to registered students.
If the material is posted on a public website, anyone can find it and see what the
course is about. But these random website visitors are not actively encouraged to look at
the class material, they stumble on it by accident. And if they are lecturers themselves,
they are certainly not allowed to just grab these syllabi and lecture notes from the web
and use them in their own classes. On this note, OpenCourseWare is different; all course
materials are posted on a centralized website, meant for anyone to find. But it goes
further than that; all material is distributed under a Creative Commons license, which
allows other educators to take entire lectures or fragments of courses and use them in
their own classes, as long as they properly credit the original creators and share their
reorganized materials under the same license. (Amsen. E. 2008)
8
3.1
Influence of the MIT OCW on teaching and Research
Teaching and research have been influenced in many ways by the creation of the
OpenCourseWare. Teaching and instruction materials that hitherto would have been
difficult or totally impossible to access are now made available for the whole world to
use. Except for those ignorant of the existence of such a medium, it has become quite
easy for university lecturers to prepare course curriculum, lecture notes and other course
instruction material. The quality of these materials is also assured due to the availability
of these materials to stakeholders in the academia for scrutiny. The materials, often
coming from world class universities and faculty, have been put through rigorous
evaluation before being placed on the internet.
The pressure of having one’s course put in the limelight and the need to remove
copyrighted material from slides or handouts means that lecturers have had to re-evaluate
all their course material before submitting it to OpenCourseWare. According to MIT’s
statistics, 32% of faculty who participated in OpenCourseWare have said that it improved
the quality of their teaching materials. Due to the fact that MIT uses OpenCourseWare
for all its courses, lecturers can also see what their colleagues are teaching, and they have
used some of that material to review in their own class. This makes courses less isolated,
leading to a more coherent overall university education.
3.2
MIT OCW and Self Learning
Self-learners can be separated into real self-learners and self-learners which study
at regular universities and use OpenCourseWare additionally. The structure of an OCW
varies depending on the issuing organization. Some of the material is based on presencestudy courses and therefore not meant for self learning in first order. Other courses are
obtained from distance-learning material and thus they are much more suitable for self
learning. Self-learners receive only little support to find their direction through
OpenCourseWare. The missing access to academic faculty is part of the OCW concept
and this makes the solely application of OCW to gain an academic understanding very
difficult. Another significant hindrance to self learning is the lack of a degree. (Olaf
Resch 2007)
9
There are bound to be learners whose exclusive interest is the knowledge itself or
more likely who do not have any other access to teaching and therefore will work their
way through the material, but it should be high on the agenda to make learning easier
especially for this highly motivated learner type.
Students who study at a university might use OpenCcouseWare in addition to
their regular material e.g. to gain deeper insights into subjects that are not taught at their
own university. Another usage might be the pre-selection of interesting fields of study for
prospective students. Even though OCW is free of charge, some courses require the
purchase of additional material, e.g. textbooks.
3.3
MIT OCW and the Academic Curriculum of Universities in Developing
Nations.
It is not unusual for university lecturers in developing countries to handle classes
without adequate materials or course content; the resources made available by the
OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have gone a long way to
solve this problem.
If universities and other tertiary institutions of higher learning in developing
nations of the world could harness the resources made available through the MIT
OpenCourseWare, a lot would be achieved in improving on the present quality of
education being provided by institutions in these countries.
10
CHAPTER FOUR
4.0.
CONCLUSION.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is
undoubtedly a great step towards the needed revolution in the quality education of many
countries. The enormous amount of materials made available freely on the internet by the
university through its OpenCourseWare puts paid to the usual difficulty encountered
when searching for academic materials on the internet.
Despite derogatory comments in various circles concerning the OCW scheme, I
am personally of the opinion that the MIT OCW is the actualization of a desire in
academic quarters for the globalization of education. Every student in the world can now
have access to world class education or at least be made aware of the quality of education
he or she should aspire to acquire.
It would therefore be very advantageous to the academia if many more institutions
of higher learning could join in the OpenCourseWare movement and make their course
materials available freely on the internet.
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