Open CourseWare: A case study in institutional decision making

Academe, Sep/Oct 2002 by Lerman, Steven R, Miyagawa, Shigeru

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.

On April 4, 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a major new initiative called MIT OpenCourseWare. In addition to generating widespread publicity, including a front-page article in the New York Times, the announcement led to MIT's receiving more than a thousand e-mail messages, most of which reflected the enormous excitement engendered by this first-ofa-kind program. The concept behind OpenCourseWare, known as OCW, is deceptively simple: MIT will create Web sites for all of the courses it teaches, which will be open and freely accessible to the world. The university has committed itself to making OCW a permanent element of its activity by providing financial support for the program in its regularly budgeted operations.1

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

Individual professors at many universities (including the authors of this article) have publicly accessible Web sites on which they make their teaching materials freely available. The natural question to ask is, "What distinguishes OCW from what is already happening?" The ways in which OCW differs from these scattered initiatives are in (a) the intent of MIT to systematically build Web sites for all of the courses it offers; (b) the plan for a central support organization that will help to produce the Web sites without requiring extraordinary efforts by individual professors; (c) the creation of a single, searchable organizing structure spanning all the courses; (d) MIT's commitment to the OCW Web site as an enduring feature of the university's operations; (e) a plan to provide a consistent, but not overly constraining, "look" for the sites of the courses represented; and () the decision to allow free and open reuse of OCW materials for all nonprofit educational and research purposes.

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

The initiative that led to OCW began with MIT's Council on Educational Technology (MITCET). MITCET's Web site explains that the council "provides strategic guidance and oversight of MIT efforts to develop an infrastructure and initiatives for the application of technology to education." In spring 2000, MITCET launched a new program for lifelong learning and appointed a core team composed of different members of the MIT community to implement it: faculty, administrators, and graduate students, including Shigeru Miyagawa, one of the authors of this article. The team, led by Dick Yue, associate dean of the School of Engineering, and assisted by a team of consultants from the firm Booz, Allen, and Hamilton, Inc., was "to develop a recommendation to address how MIT can generate and offer [online educational] modules that provide the target market with a working understanding of current hot issues and emerging fields." An earlier MITCET study had identified the "hot issues and emerging fields" and determined that the modules needed to meet three conditions: they had to fulfill the objectives of the program and be financially viable and sustainable.

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.