MIT unveils free Web education pilot - tech briefs - OpenCourseWare project - Brief Article

Black Issues in Higher Education, Nov 7, 2002 by Ronald Roach

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

Unveiled in late September, the much-anticipated Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare project has gotten under way as a pilot program. In an effort by MIT to publish all its course materials on the Internet, school officials have made the materials of 32 courses available to anyone with an Internet connection and a Web browser. Course materials include the syllabi, lecture notes, exams and answers, and videotaped class lectures.

By the 2006-2007 school year, MIT plans to publish the course materials for virtually all of its 2,000 graduate and undergraduate courses. The move to put the materials online stems from a multiyear effort by the MIT faculty to forge a unified approach to online access to its classes. MIT officials have no plans to charge for any of the material.

"We are fighting the commercialization of knowledge, much in the same way that open-source people are fighting the commercialization of software," says Jon Paul Potts, an MIT spokesman.