Open Course Ware: A Case Study in Institutional Decision Making

Bucking the rush to commercialize learning, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology chose to make its entire curriculum free and open to the public. Faculty governance and strong institutional values made that choice possible

By Steven R. Lerman and Shigeru Miyagawa

As with all seemingly simple ideas, the difficult and complex parts lie in the details. OCW is very much a work in progress. The specifics of how we will reach our goals are to some degree unknown, and much remains to be discussed and decided by the faculty and staff who will implement OCW. Nevertheless, MIT's experience in planning and testing OCW has provided insight into how the program is likely to develop.

OpenCourseWare

MIT does not envision OCW as a distance education initiative. We do not intend for students to enroll in OCW courses or degree programs, nor will we offer MIT credit through the OCW program. We will not arrange for interactions with the MIT faculty through the OCW Web site, although some professors may voluntarily choose to correspond with users. The OCW site will simply be a collection of our teaching materials. Users themselves will decide how to profit from the electronic materials we post.

OCW is best thought of as a twenty-first century adaptation of a publishing initiative. Faculty members' participation in the program will be much more akin to writing and publishing textbooks than to teaching courses. We certainly hope that the materials we make available through the Web site will influence how others teach and learn, in the same way that many textbooks have influenced pedagogy around the world. We see OCW as a way to express our faculty's views on the structure and organization of teaching.

Discovery Process

At that time, "e-learning" was a powerful buzzword among universities and companies worldwide (both well-established and newly minted ones), but especially in the United States. Organizations were launching start-up ventures and competing for market leadership and financing. Befitting the excitement of the times, MIT's core team began with the idea of making its program generate revenue, that is, ensuring that it would be "financially viable and sustainable"-although the question whether it would be a for-profit endeavor was left open.

How did the lifelong learning team start with a revenue-generating strategy but, in the end, recommend OCW? Hindsight makes it easier to see how all the pieces came together, but for the core team members investigating ideas, nothing was certain, even as late as fall 2000. Of all the ideas considered, that of offering content free of charge was never discussed until close to the launch of OCW. Before deciding on OCW, the core team conducted three major studies: team members interviewed organizations, both educational institutions and companies, engaged in e-learning; they pursued market research and created a business model; and they assessed current e-learning projects at MIT.

The external interviews targeted large companies that offered extensive in-house training programs and institutions of higher learning that had e-learning programs. The roughly forty interviews conducted over four months revealed that a great deal of e-learning was already going on in various forms. The team members concluded that MIT should launch an initiative of its own to stake a position in what appeared to be the most dynamic area of higher education.

But what could MIT do? More research made this question more difficult to answer. E-learning companies, many of them recently established, were signing up universities and, in some cases, prominent scholars in order to license content with "brand" value. It would have been inappropriate for MIT to follow a similar path. It could not "sign up" other institutions that were already engaged in e-learning of their own, and it certainly could not make an initial public offering, because it is a nonprofit organization. Briefly, the team considered launching a for-profit arm of MIT, as some other institutions of higher learning had done (for example, Columbia University established Fathom.com), but this strategy was not pursued.

In developing a business model for a lifelong learning initiative, the core team's market research involved collecting data from MIT alumni with assistance from the university's alumni association. The team saw the alumni as representative of the target audience: college graduates, many of whom are professionals. This market research resulted in several surprising findings. For example, some respondents said they would prefer module-based courses of twenty to thirty minutes each, a time span much too brief to treat any subject matter in depth. The team documented that finding and others—such as the desired level of interactivity (younger respondents wanted more) and the maximum cost individuals and sponsoring companies were willing to pay. The team members then studied different combinations for generating the maximum revenue relative to the cost of production and administration.

In one of the most plausible models developed through this research, an online program would become financially independent in five years. That conclusion contrasted sharply with daily news reports about the enormous amounts of money being made from similar initiatives.

The external interviews, market research, and business scenarios cast doubt on the initial idea of a lifelong learning program that would generate net revenue. It was not clear what MIT could do to define a unique strategy. But the third study—the one assessing existing e-learning projects at MIT—ultimately led the core team to consider an alternative to a revenue-generating initiative. The team interviewed about sixty MIT faculty members who responded to an e-mail query asking about e-learning initiatives in which they were already involved. Their projects ranged from text-based Web sites to online videos of lectures with accompanying study questions. All of the projects related to MIT courses the faculty members were teaching.

Two important lessons came out of these interviews. First, the team learned that, without exception, the faculty respondents created online materials to improve the quality of their teaching. Second, with few exceptions, the faculty members received no monetary compensation for their work. These interviews revealed a core commitment among the respondents to continuously improve their teaching as part of their responsibility as faculty members.

Implementation Phase

Posting course materials online would not, of course, be equivalent to offering the experience of an MIT education; that can be had only by enrolling in MIT, interacting with the professors, and living and studying with fellow students. But making MIT course materials available online would send a strong message about the university's vision: in the era of the Internet economy, MIT values learning, including e-learning, over financial gain.

OCW had the added advantage of circumventing problems identified in the background studies, most notably, generation of sufficient revenue; OCW would not require a money-making scheme. But implementing OCW would not be free. The final task of the core team was to create a business model for the program defining the cost of its production and administration. The team estimated that it would take $85 million over ten years to produce online materials from all of the courses MIT offered in 2000.

The core team prepared a report recommending OCW to the provost in November, and the idea was accepted enthusiastically. It was then reported to MIT's president, Charles Vest, who embraced it with equal enthusiasm. Members of MITCET gave separate briefings to every academic department and program at MIT, after which OCW was discussed at a university-wide faculty meeting. Faculty asked questions about implementation, cost, and the potential for giving away an MIT education at no cost, all of which MITCET members addressed. The support among faculty was strong, opening the way for the public announcement of OCW on April 4, 2001.

The Faculty

Faculty members also asked about how OCW would provide services to them. Like almost all faculties, MIT's professors are distinctly skeptical about the quality and cost of services offered by central organizations. We found through surveying them that they prefer what we call a "hybrid organization" in which they interact on a daily basis with OCW staff residing locally in academic departments, rather than with someone housed in a central organization. That means that OCW will have to place a substantial portion of its staff in the departments. The centralized OCW organization will provide services such as specialized media conversion, administration, and training. These services will be coordinated among the departmentally based OCW staff.

As we have already suggested, the key caveat to the general faculty support for OCW is that it cannot impose an additional time burden on them. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this issue. As a faculty, we operate essentially at capacity, and doing any new task inevitably means not doing something else. The faculty wants the OCW organization to make it as easy as possible for them to participate in the initiative, and many will not do so unless they believe that the level of organizational support will be substantial.

Future Decisions

Choices about technology also must be made. OCW is much closer in spirit to a large-scale publishing initiative than to the traditional educational and research mission that occupies most of MIT's energy. It remains to be seen what mix of commercial and "home grown" technologies might prove useful in developing a publishing workflow that is not only efficient but also responsive to faculty members' needs.

It will be several years before we know whether the enormous promise of OCW will be realized. The major issues of academic policy, intellectual property rights, organizational structure, and funding that OCW has raised within MIT have only been partly resolved. We hope that as we continue to explore these matters, OCW can serve as a model for similar initiatives at other universities around the world.

End Note

Steven Lerman is Class of 1922 Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and chair of MIT's OpenCourseWare Interim Management Board. Shigeru Miyagawa is professor of linguistics and Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. The authors express their thanks for the many helpful comments provided by Kyung Han and Laura Koller. They also thank Toby Woll and Marsha Sanders for their comments.

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