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MIT to Post Free Course Material on Web
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced plans to post on the Internet materials for nearly all of its courses. Access to the materials, which will include lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, and assignments, will be open to the public and free of charge. The information posted could be used as reference material, as a source for curriculum development, or as a foundation for independent study.
Unlike many other Web-based educational ventures, MIT’s project will not offer full-fledged distance courses or college credit.
Using course materials online does not approximate the real MIT experience, MIT president Charles Vest told the New York Times. "Our central value is people: the human experience of faculty working with students in classrooms and laboratories, and students learning from each other, and the kind of intensive environment we create in our residential community," Vest said.
Open dissemination of educational materials and innovations in teaching is an important tradition in American higher education, said Steven Lerman, chair of the MIT faculty, in an announcement of the project. He expressed concern over the growing "privatization of knowledge," while acknowledging that MIT, like many other universities, has treated the Internet as a means of delivering revenue-generating distance education.
MIT’s project, dubbed OpenCourseWare, will begin as a large-scale pilot program over the next two years. At the end of that time, it is expected that materials for more than five hundred courses will be available online. The project is then slated to expand gradually. Professors may decline to participate in the program if they object to having their materials put online.
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