At a press conference on April 4, 2001, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced its commitment to make the materials from virtually all of its courses freely available on the World Wide Web for noncommercial use. This new initiative, called MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), reflects MIT’s commitment to disseminate knowledge across the globe.

　MIT sees its OCW as providing a way to share its thinking about the content of a modern curriculum in all the areas in which MIT excels. Users of this site (http://ocw.mit. edu/index.htm) may include other academics around the world and individual learners who may not have access to similar educational materials.

　The task of creating a highly visible website that draws together the materials of virtually all of MIT’s course offerings is considerable. However, the majority of its faculty support this effort and believe that it is consistent with MIT’s long-standing objective to focus the contributions of both its faculty and its new technologies on broad, societal benefits. The following is a news report about it from New York Times on April 4, 2001.

Auditing Classes at MIT on the Web and Free
By Carey Goldberg

　　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 plans on Wednesday to announce a 10-year initiative, apparently the biggest of its kind, that intends 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.

　　Visitors will not earn college credits. The giveaway idea, President Charles M. Vest of MIT said, 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.

　Ten years later, OCW has shared materials from more than 2 000 courses. It has reached 100 million individuals worldwide to date — people with the ideas, talents and motivation to have enormous impact on their communities, given the opportunity to do so. MIT has a good reason to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this groundbreaking effort in 2011.

　MIT’s goal for the next decade is to increase its reach ten-fold: to reach a billion minds. MIT aspires by 2021 to make open educational resources like OCW the tools to bridge the global gap between human potential and opportunity, so that motivated people everywhere can improve their lives and change the world.

　Human potential is universal; opportunity is not. OCW began with the vision that the teaching tools of the world’s top learning institutions should be freely available to all humanity: to study, to share, to build upon.

　How will MIT do this? First and foremost, it will continue to improve the depth and quality of its core publication, and to improve its site. In addition, it has identified four focus areas with the potential to reach its goal:

　Placing OCW everywhere — it will make OCW content easy to find, adapt OCW materials to distribution methods such as mobile phones, and develop new approaches to reaching underserved populations.

　Reaching key audiences — For more people to get the most out of OCW, it has to put more in. It will customize OCW to meet the needs of people across a wide range of cultures and backgrounds.

　Creating communities of open learning — It will create an ecosystem for open learning that goes beyond content. Over the next decade, it will take advantage of new technologies to ensure people to interact around OCW, increasing their understanding of the material.

　Empowering educators worldwide — Educators are a key multiplier for MIT. By bringing OCW materials into their classrooms, they share MIT’s content with millions. MIT will strive to provide educators everywhere with the tools they need to serve these students.

　As MIT claims, OCW, a web-based publication of all its course content reflecting almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT, is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.

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