OpenCourseWare and the Mission of MIT

Academe: When MIT unveiled the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, Charles Vest, the university's president, noted (a little modestly) that OCW "looks counterintuitive in a market-driven world." What is it about MIT that led you to this counterintuitive approach to the Internet and education?

Abelson: Partly, I think, MIT likes to view itself as an institution that takes leadership positions. OCW comes from the sense that MIT prides itself on the way it influences what other academics do. What's the mechanism for doing that, for leading and influencing, today? It's the Internet. More important, OCW represents the confluence of our technical ability to do something and MIT's history of valuing openness. President Vest likes to ask what the Internet is for. OCW is an answer to that question.

Academe: Can you talk a little more about the value of "openness," especially in contrast to the current enthusiasm in higher education for for-profit Internet ventures?

Abelson: Our feeling about the for-profit model is that not only are you not going to make money by selling higher education online; many universities are going to lose money hand over fist. If it were so easy to make money that way, publishers would be a lot richer than they are. A deeper issue is that once you begin looking at college courses, course materials, and teaching as property, there are tremendous risks to the fabric of academic culture. That kind of approach can be profoundly destructive to the idea of a university community. Fundamentally, when you talk about a university or an academic culture, you're talking about a precious community of scholars, researchers, and teachers. What we're trying to do with OCW, and with another initiative called dSpace, is to expand the boundaries of that community. It's complicated, because faculty have their primary identification with disciplines, and academic community depends on fragile links. What you hope is that the university is a place where you can emphasize shared values and the fact that you have this knowledge community.

Academe: Compared with other online efforts, OCW seems to embody a different set of assumptions about education.

Abelson: Yes, we're careful to think about OCW as an online publication. Deep, deep in the MIT value system is the belief you don't separate research from education. As an MIT student you get to interact with faculty as an active researcher. OCW publishes MIT course materials, but it doesn't provide the interaction that makes an MIT education. To borrow from business language, what any enterprise does when it thinks about value is think about where its differentiators are, what makes it different from the rest. The interaction between students and faculty at MIT is the difference that makes our value.

Academe: Can you talk a little about dSpace?

Abelson: dSpace is a preprint service for university research. We're trying to create a repository with a federated architecture that would allow other institutions, in addition to MIT, to publish preprint articles through an interconnected archive. dSpace represents an institutional commitment to public dissemination of knowledge through a permanent, indexed, stable repository of MIT faculty publications, underwritten and backed by our library and by professional librarians. dSpace is an answer to the question, "What's the institutional commitment and kind of society that will make sure that scholarly information remains available?" It looks as though our first federated participant will be Cambridge University.

Academe: You talked about the dangers of viewing knowledge and teaching as property. How do OCW and dSpace speak to the issue of intellectual property in higher education?

Abelson: The usual question is: a faculty member creates a course, but who owns it? Like many other institutions, Columbia University, for example, went through a phase in which it wanted to preserve academic community. It therefore proposed a policy under which all intellectual property would belong to the university. But the law school faculty balked at this, and the university ended up viewing the issue through a different lens. It decided that it's not about who owns property, but about a faculty member's primary commitment. This idea turns debates about intellectual property into a discussion about what interferes or doesn't interfere with your commitment as a faculty member in the institution. The more people can stop talking about property and start talking about the nature of a faculty member's commitment to the institution, the healthier the discussion will be. It's not really about what you own as a faculty member; it's about what you do as a faculty member.

Academe: OCW and dSpace represent a massive publication of knowledge. What will these publications accomplish?

Abelson: One thing to keep in mind is the global reach of the Internet and so of OCW and dSpace. Partly, the intent is to exploit this reach. For example, an education minister or a professor in a developing country might now be able to see new ways of organizing university programs in chemical engineering or other fields. OCW is not just a collection of individual courses; it's also a mirror of a whole university curriculum. Seeing courses and knowledge as part of this connected whole is a big win for academics who may not have the opportunity or resources to rethink their curricula or institutions. Also, from an institutional perspective, it would be great if rich communities would spring up and add value to this idea of a "course material commons," as would be expected to happen with any kind of commons.

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