CHAPTER ONE
1.0.INTRODUCTION.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, theyearning for an internet based platform where course materials can be accessed by university faculty, students and the general public became very pronounced in academic circles. The proponents of this medium; later known as “Open Course Ware”, based their rationale on the need for a course-specific source of academic materials that would address academic needs differently fromonline libraries and distance learning websites.These lead to the launching of an Open Course Ware (OCW)by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)in October 2002. The university, having being at the forefront of the Open Course Waremovement, was the first to launch an Open Course Ware on the internet.
1.1.Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT).
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The university has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded by William Barton Rogers in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, the university adopted the German university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Its current 168 acre campus opened in 1916 and extends about 1.6kilometres along the northern bank of the Charles River basin.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been ranked among the top ten universities of the world for several decades. MIT presently has 10,220 students with postgraduate students accounting for about sixty percent of this figure.MIT researchers were involved in efforts to develop computers, radar, and inertial guidance in connection with defense research during the second World War. In the past sixty years, MIT's educational programs have expanded beyond the physical sciences and engineering into social sciences like economics, philosophy, linguistics, political science, and management.
1.2.OpenCourseWare (OCW).
OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term applied to course materials created by universities and shared freely with the world via the internet. The OpenCourseWare movement began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare in October 2002. Since then, other universities like Utah State University, Tuft University and Delft University have also created OpenCourseWare projects.
An Open Course Ware project is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses that are made available for use and adaptation under an open license. Open Course Ware is usually made available to the public for no cost and does not provide certification or access to instructors.
OpenCourseWare is seen in academic circles as an effort to combine the openness of a public library with the academic intensity of a university, it combines world class research and world class teaching with the World Wide Web. OpenCourseWare is envisioned as a way to narrow the digital divide, to help educators in developing countries to ramp up their curricula, and to assist students and self-learners who could not afford to attend or meet the entrance requirements for a world class education.
Evidently, OpenCourseWare has come to stay. Considering the revolutionary effect this medium is having on the dissemination of high quality education to developed and developing nations alike, it could be asserted that the enormous amount of financial resources invested into the scheme and the potential profit ignored by the universities involved in OpenCourseWare projects have not been expended in vain.
CHAPTER TWO
2.0Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate and graduate level courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere, by the end of the year 2007. MIT OpenCourseWare can be considered as a large-scale, web-based publication of MIT course materials. The project was announced in October 2002. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) can be accessed on the internet at
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is jointly funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The initiative has encouraged a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as open educational resources. (Wikipedia 2009)
As of November 2007, over 1800 MIT courses were available online. While a few of these are limited to chronological reading lists and discussion topics, a majority provided homework problems and examinations, often with solutions and lecture notes. Some courses also include interactive web demonstrations, complete textbooks written by MIT professors, and streaming video lectures.
As of August 2008, of the over 1800 courses available, only 26 included complete video lectures, and not all of these have complete lecture notes. The lack of lecture notes makes it difficult to follow some lectures, for example, when the lecturer is referring to slides being projected in the lecture hall. The selection of available courses is somewhat incomplete. For example, prerequisite classes for a given course are frequently not available. However, the quality of those courses which include complete materials is very high, and many of the lecturers are extremely compelling. The video is available in streaming mode, but may also be downloaded for viewing offline, though the procedure for downloading is not explicitly given.
The MIT OCW is seen by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a means to assist students and self-learners who could not afford to attend or meet the entrance requirements for an MIT education. Not only does MIT want the outside world to utilize its OpenCourseWare, but it also wants the revolution to spread and for other institutions around the world to adopt OpenCourseWare for their own courses.
2.1History of MIT OpenCourseWare
In the year 1999, MIT provost, Robert Brown charged the MIT Council on Education Technology with the responsibility of determining how MIT should position itself in the distance learning and e-learning environment. The MIT OpenCourseWare was then initiated to provide a new model for the dissemination of knowledge and collaboration among scholars around the world.The project was spearheaded by Hal Abelson and other MIT Faculty. (S. Eppinger 2009)
In late 2000, the MIT Council on Educational Technology, in response to the provost’s request, introduced a plan to open their course content to the rest of the world at no cost. Charles Vest, who was MIT’s president at that time, was astounded at the proposition, but eventually bought the idea. Considering the profit earning e-learning provisions that were being launched by other universities, Charles Vest assumed that the MIT faculty would propose a distance learning venture that would be income generating.(Kirkpatrick .K. 2006)
In September 2002, the MIT OpenCourseWare proof ofconcept pilot site opened to the public, offering 32 courses. In September 2003, MIT OpenCourseWare published its 500th course, including some courses with complete streaming video lectures. By September 2004, 900 MIT courses were available online. As of November 2007, over 1800 MIT courses were available on the MIT OpenCourseWare. The response from MIT faculty and students has been very positive and MIT OpenCourseWare is seen as being consistent with MIT's mission to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the American nation and the world in the 21st century and is true to MIT's values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.
In 2005, MIT OpenCourseWare and other leading open educational resources projects formed the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which seeks to extend the reach and impact of open course materials, foster new open course materials and develop sustainable models for open course material publication.
2.2Technology used in publishing the MIT OpenCourseWare.
For the pilot phase, which ended in September 2003, the Web pages of the MIT OCW site werebuilt using HTML. UtilizingWeb content editors such as DreamWeaver, a team of programmers from MIT and the Sapient Corp, a business and development consulting firm, designed and built the first 32 subjects.However, that model was not scalable for hundreds of courses, so MIT OpenCourseWare has implemented aContent Management System (CMS) in order to achieve MIT OCW's long-term publishing goals.(J.P. Potts 2007)
The Content Management System which has been in use since the beginning of 2003 is a customized commercial option,Microsoft Content Management System 2002. The reasons for the choice of Microsoft 2002 weremanifold: Microsoft made a serious commitment to the MIT OCW project, the total cost ofownership of Microsoft CMS 2002 was significantly lower than the other vendors in consideration,and the Microsoft product offered a high-level of usability for the end-users, MIT OCW’s facultyliaisons and MIT’s faculty. (J.P. Potts 2007)
The entire MIT OCW Web site is now published dynamically out of thecustomized CMS. Embedded in the course sites are a number of file types, including AdobeAcrobat PDF files, Java Applets, Shockwave, Real Player, Java, and MATLAB. All of theseapplications are easily downloaded from the MIT OCW Technical Requirements page. (J.P. Potts 2007)
2.3Characteristics and Features of the MIT OpenCourseWare
The MIT OpenCourseWare is free for all users and does not require any form of registration. All persons willing to use the MIT OCW are simply required to access the MIT OCW website and navigate to the course or materials of their choice. These materials are made available in different format; choice of download format will be dependent on the user’s preference. The MIT OCW is be presently made available in about 10 languages,including Spanish, Portuguese German, Mongolian, Vietnamese, and Ukrainian.
The MIT OpenCourseWare differs from other Web-based education offerings in that it is free and open, because of its depth and breadth, and because it takes an institutional approach to online course publication. MIT OCW is not a distance-learning initiative. Distance learning involves the active exchange of information between faculty and students, with the goal of obtaining some form of a credential. Increasingly, distance learning is also limited to those willing and able to pay for materials or course delivery.
MIT OCW is not meant to replace degree-granting higher education or for credit courses. Rather, the goal is to provide the content that supports an education. Many individual faculty members at MIT and other universities already use the Web extensively to make standard course materials available to their students. Some colleges and universities now require a Website for every class. But, to a large extent, these Web sites are designed for, and access is only provided to, the students enrolled at these institutions. MIT OCW is an unprecedented institutional effort of a much broader magnitude, as the goal is to provide the course materials free and open to the world.
Contents and materials gotten from the MIT OCW are not for commercial use. Commercial use would involve the assessment of a direct or indirect fee by a for-profit entity for use of the MIT OCW materials, or any derivation or modification of the MIT OCW material, or any other commercial exploitation of MIT OCW materials. All uses, reuse, and distribution of MIT OCWmaterial, including works derived from MIT OCW material, must be attributed to MIT and to theoriginal faculty authors where identified on the MIT OCW materials.
2.4Rules guiding the use of MIT OpenCourseWare The underlying premise and purpose of MIT OpenCourseWare is to make course materials used in MIT coursesfreely and openly available to others for non-commercial educational purposes. Through MIT OCW,MIT grants the right to anyone to use the materials, either as it is or in a modified form. There isno restriction on how a user can modify the materials for the user’s purpose. Materials may beedited, translated, combined with someone else's materials, reformatted, or changed in any otherway. However, there are three requirements that an MIT OCW user mustmeet to use thematerials:
1. Non-commercial: Use of MIT OCW materials is open to all except for profit-making entitieswho charge a fee for access to educational materials.
2. Attribution: Any and all use or reuse of the material, including use of derivative works (newmaterials that incorporate or draw on the original materials), must be attributed to MIT and, ifa faculty member's name is associated with the material, to that person as well.
3. Share alike : Any publication or distribution of original or derivative works,including production of electronic or printed class materials or placement of materials on aWeb site, must offer the works freely and openly to others under the same terms that MITOCW first made the works available to the user.
2.5Challenges encountered in the implementation of the MIT OpenCourseWare
The main challenge encountered in implementing the MIT OCW initiative wasnot resistance on the part of some members of the MIT faculty, as presumed by many, but rather, the logistical challenges presented by determining ownership and obtaining publication permission for the massive amount of intellectual property items that are embedded in the course materials of MIT's faculty, in addition to the time and technical effort required to convert the educational materials to an online format.
CHAPTER THREE
3.0ACADEMIC RELEVANCE OF THE MIT OCW
As of late 2007, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has made the content of over1800 of its undergraduate and graduate courses freely available online on its OpenCourseWarewebsite. Anyone with an Internet connection has access to lecture notes, assignments, examinations and sometimes videos of the lectures. Anyone can reuse or reorganize the material fortheir own purposes. When MIT first proposed the program in 2000, it was still very unusual foracademic institutions to openly share information online, whatever information was available was hard to find or hidden behind paidsubscriptions.(Amsen. E. 2008)
Currently more than one hundred higher education institutions worldwide participate inOpenCourseWare, but MIT is still the front runner; they have put more coursematerials online than any other university.It's not unusual these days for a course coordinator to run a course website with the syllabus and assignments. They might even post class notes after the respective lectures. These websites are meant purely for students who are enrolled in the course, and are sometimes only accessible to registered students.
If the material is posted on a public website, anyone can find it and see what the course is about. But these random website visitors are not actively encouraged to look at the class material, they stumble on it by accident. And if they are lecturers themselves, they are certainly not allowed to just grab these syllabi and lecture notes from the web and use them in their own classes. On this note, OpenCourseWare is different; all course materials are posted on a centralized website, meant for anyone to find. But it goes further than that; all material is distributed under a Creative Commons license, which allows other educators to take entire lectures or fragments of courses and use them in their own classes, as long as they properly credit the original creators and share their reorganized materials under the same license. (Amsen.E. 2008)
3.1Influence of the MIT OCW on teaching and Research
Teaching and research have been influenced in many ways by the creation of the OpenCourseWare.Teaching and instruction materials that hitherto would have been difficult or totally impossible to access are now made available for the whole world to use. Except for those ignorant of the existence of such a medium, it has become quite easy for university lecturers to prepare course curriculum, lecture notes and other course instruction material. The quality of these materials is also assured due to the availability of these materials to stakeholders in the academia for scrutiny. The materials, often coming from world class universities and faculty, have been put through rigorous evaluation before being placed on the internet.
The pressure of having one’s course put in the limelight and the need to remove copyrighted material from slides or handouts means that lecturers have had to re-evaluate all their course material before submitting it to OpenCourseWare. According to MIT’s statistics, 32% of faculty who participated in OpenCourseWare have said that it improved the quality of their teaching materials. Due to the fact that MIT uses OpenCourseWare for all its courses, lecturers can also see what their colleagues are teaching, and they have used some of that material to review in their own class. This makes courses less isolated, leading to a more coherent overall university education.