April 04, 2001, 2:44 PM — The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Wednesday unveiled an ambitious plan for making nearly all of its course materials available online to the general public over the next 10 years.
The project -- MITOpenCourseWare -- will create static Web pages containing the entirety of a typical MIT course. That includes lecture notes, course outlines, syllabi, reading lists, and assignments. The project is expected to eventually provide material for up to 2,000 courses in every discipline studied at MIT, which is in Cambridge. The information will be provided free, moving away from what Steven Lerman, chairman of the MIT faculty, called the growing "privatization of knowledge," in the statement.
MIT will now enter a 2-year pilot program, during which the institute will determine how best to make the project available globally. The impetus for the project came from meetings of the Council on Educational Technology, a group of educational leaders within MIT. They asked a mixture of MIT faculty and staff plus consultants from Booz-Allen & Hamilton Inc. to develop ideas for enhancing education through the use of Internet technologies, the statement said.
Copyright issues and the possibility that making course materials so widely available will depreciate the value of an MIT education were dismissed by Patti Richards of the MIT Lab for Computer Science in an interview.
She said the faculty are largely unconcerned with the prospect of their work being distributed widely. Rather, MIT Provost Robert A. Brown touted the project as leading to a new way of allowing educators to collaborate nationally and globally in the statement.
MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, can be reached at http://www.mit.edu .
