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The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT

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Abstract

This paper traces the genesis of the MIT OpenCourseWare project from its initial strategic precursors in 1999 and 2000, through its launch in 2001 and its subsequent evolution. The story told here illuminates the interplay among institutional leadership, and strategic planning, and with university culture in launching major educational technology enterprises. It also shows how initiatives can evolve in unexpected ways, and can even surpass their initial goals. The paper concludes with an overview of challenges facing OpenCourseWare in moving from the end of its production ramp-up and towards sustainability.

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Notes

  1. See Dori, Yuhudit Judi and John Belcher (2004) “How Does Technology-Enabled Active Learning Affect Undergraduate Students’ Understanding of Electromagnetism Concepts?” The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14 (2), 2004. Also J. Dori, J. Belcher, M. Bessette, M. Danziger, A. McKinney, and E. Hult, “Technology for Active Learning.” Materials Today, December 2003, pp. 44–49.

  2. A “visit” here, in contrast to a “hit,” refers to a sequence of accesses to the OCW web site, separated in time from the next visit by at least 30 min. A single visit thus typically consists of multiple hits.

  3. These statistics are based on the monthly reports form MIT OpenCourseWare and the OpenCourseWare Consortium. The MIT OpenCourseWare web site is at <http://ocw.mit.edu> and the consortium web site is at <http://www.ocwconsortium.org/>.

  4. Final Report of the Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries, UNESCO, Paris, July, 2002, document code CI.2002/CONF.803/CLD.1, at <http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ulis/cgi-bin/ulis.pl?catno=128515>, visited October 10, 2006.

  5. MIT’s decision to launch OpenCourseWare is also discussed by Steve Lerman and Shigeru Miyagawa in “Open Course Ware: A Case Study in Institutional Decision Making,” Academe Online, vol. 88, no. 5, Sept.–Oct. 2002, at <http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2002/02so/02soler.htm>, visited June 27, 2006.

  6. “Provost announces formation of council on educational technology”, MIT News Office, September 29, 1999, at <http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/council-0929.html>, visited March 19, 2006.

  7. Brown resigned as MIT Provost in September 2005, to assume the presidency of Boston University.

  8. Quoted in Robert Lenzer and Stephen Johnson, “Seeing things as they really are,” Forbes, March 10, 1997.

  9. Unpublished memo from Hal Abelson and Helen Samuels to the MIT Educational Technology Council, May 2000.

  10. “Lifelong Learning Study, Summer 2000” report to the MIT Academic Council Deans’ Committee, October 17, 2000.

  11. “OpenCourseWare@mit.edu: Background information for the Faculty”, January 2001 (unpublished MIT internal memo to faculty)

  12. Email comment to the OCW planning group in response to a department meeting.

  13. Ibid.

  14. MIT Record of the Faculty Meeting of February 21, 2001. On the Web at <https://web.mit.edu/dept/libdata/libdepts/d/archives/facmin/010221/010221.html>, visited July 11, 2006.

  15. “Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free,” Carey Goldberg, New York Times, April 4, 2001.

  16. See < http://www.universia.net/> for Universia, <http://www.core.org.cn> for CORE, and <http://www.myoops.org/twocw/> for OOPS.

  17. See William Reilly, Robert Wolfe, and MacKenzie Smith, “MIT’s CWSpace project: packaging metadata for archiving educational content in DSpace,” Intnl. J. Digital Libraries, 6(2), 2006, pp: 139–147.

  18. The Caliber Learning Network and Pensare both filed for bankruptcy in 2001, UNext came under financial pressure that same year, renegotiated its university agreements and morphed into Cardean University, which offers online graduate and undergraduate programs. Columbia’s Fathom consortium, which at one point had 14 partners and won awards in 2002 and 2003, closed down in 2003. Princeton withdrew from the POSY Alliance, which had been launched February 2000, only two year later, in Nobember 2001. The remaining Oxford-Stanford-Yale venture carried on but struggled to attract enough students to meet its costs, and eventually closed its doors in March 2006. (“Elite Universities End Venture to Provide Noncredit Online Courses,” Andrea Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 23, 2006.)

Acknowledgements

The following members of the MIT community graciously provided background information for this essay: Alex d’Arbeloff, Jesús del Alamo, Steve Carson, Andrew Eisenmann, Morton Flemings, Eric Grimson, Judson Harward, Anne Margulies, Jennifer Stine, Diana Strange, John Vandersande, and Dick Yue. The early phase of OpenCourseWare is also discussed by Steve Lerman and Shigeru Miyagawa in “Open Course Ware: A Case Study in Institutional Decision Making,” Academe Online, vol. 88, no. 5, Sept.–Oct. 2002, at <http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2002/02so/02soler.htm>, visited June 27, 2006.

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  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Hal Abelson

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Correspondence to Hal Abelson.

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Abelson, H. The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT. J Sci Educ Technol 17, 164–174 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-007-9060-8

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