The Daily Gamecock

Issue date: 2/15/08 Section: News

MIT is now offering class material online for free.

How does a free education from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) sound?

With a project called OpenCourseWare (ocwconsortium.org) up and running, it's almost a reality.

The program currently offers syllabi, lecture notes, labs and a wealth of other materials for courses at MIT and many other universities worldwide - all without users paying a cent of tuition.

The project is the brainchild of MIT's Lifelong Learning Committee, which met in the summer of 2000, according to OCW's External Relations Director Steve Carson.

The committee was charged with answering two questions: How is the Internet going to change education, and what is MIT going to do about it?

The answer to the first question was uncertain, but the answer to the second was the creation of a Web site that today offers content from almost every class in the MIT curriculum.

"Most people aren't coming to work their way through an entire class," said Carson, noting that the materials tend to act as instructional supplements for professors and study aids for students. It is impossible to earn a free diploma through the OCW service, Carson said.

"The content isn't the education," Carson said. "There's no replacement for having faculty and other students work through material with you."

MIT hopes to generate revenue from the site through corporate sponsorship, visitor donations and an endowment, but the service will remain complimentary.

"We're committed in the long term to keeping materials free and available to end users," Carson said.

The project has expanded to become an international knowledge forum, with over 100 institutions - from China's Shanxi University to South Africa's University of the Western Cape - now offering services through the Web site.

It has also inspired imitators.

On Dec. 11, Yale University unveiled its Open Yale Courses (open.yale.edu), an offering of seven introductory courses including a surprisingly non-morbid PHIL 176 class entitled "Death."

Diana Kleiner, the Yale program's principal investigator, said the OCW program is a magnificent achievement.

"All of us have been inspired by that achievement," Kleiner said.

Yale took a different route, however, by offering the courses' complete lectures in audio, video and text formats.

Continued...

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