MIT's leap of faith - editor's note - online curricula at Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Brief Article

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, June, 2001 by Wayne D'Orio

By now, we all know the news that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made in April when it announced that it would put almost all of its course material online, for free. At first blush, this seems like a radical idea. Closer inspection, however, shows that this isn't a groundbreaking idea, but rather a groundbreaking use of an existing medium, the Internet.

Courses have been put online for years, mostly for profit. But nowhere has a university taken a stance such as MIT's. And that's where the real intrigue about this experiment starts.

As this month's cover story shows, the plan's announcement is simply the beginning. The most interesting aspect about "OpenCourseWare" is not that it came unexpectedly out of the school's Council on Educational Technology, but that the university took this leap not knowing exactly where it will land.

The legacy of this plan depends not only on MIT's actions, but also on its acceptance around the world. Yet, even if the experiment stirs no one outside Cambridge, Mass., it can still be a success.

Simply put, the plan to put courses online can cause two major changes at MIT. One, transferring information from professors to students this way can drastically change what occurs in the university's classrooms. Instead of taking notes each class, students can grab the notes online and use their time in the class for discussion, small-group experiments or whatever else professors can think of. Second, this information can help the school's nearly 1,000 faculty learn what is happening outside their classroom and their department. The benefit of knowing what students were taught in previous classes is obvious.

But the greatest payoff of this experiment will come as people outside the college's borders get their hands on this information. Putting class outlines online can help Third-World countries set up their own higher-education sites as well as create a community with other colleges and universities to share information about their courses on similar topics.

With so much hand-wringing going on about the impact of distance education and how it could hurt some schools by driving customers away, MIT delivered the perfect counter-punch. It unveiled a bold plan that wasn't made with a bottom line in sight, but with a simple goal of helping educate people worldwide. Maybe this was a radical idea after all.