Study University Courses Online Free - MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW)
By Scholarshipupdate.com - Sun 27th Jul, 2008 15:28:50 GMT
For about $27,000 a year, elite students can earn a degree at MIT, one of the most prestigious schools in the US. And now the rest of the world can access MIT's curriculum on the Web for free, no tests or admissions essays required.
Like almost every organisation in the US, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spent the late 1990s struggling with the question of how to take advantage of the internet.
Many other colleges launched online degree courses aimed at anyone with a modem and a big wallet.
But MIT has taken a completely different direction with a project called OpenCourseWare (OCW) that could stop the trend of commercialising online education dead in its tracks.
There is no online degrees for sale, however. Instead, it will offer thousands of pages of information, available to anyone around the globe at no cost, as well as hours and hours of streaming video lectures, seminars and experiments.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. MIT has started nothing short of a global revolution in education.
"Our hope and aspiration is that by setting an example, other universities will also put their valued materials on the internet and thereby make a truly profound and fundamental impact on learning and education worldwide," said MIT's Professor Dick Yue.
In late 2000, the faculty-led Council on Educational Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) introduced a plan to open their course content to the rest of the world at no cost. MIT's then-president, Charles Vest, was astounded, but immediately jumped on board. In a market-driven society, Vest assumed that the faculty would propose a for-profit, "MIT.com," distance-learning venture, such as many institutions were implementing. Instead Vest got a proposed initiative more in concert with the booming open source movement. He commented, "It is typical of our faculty to come up with something as bold and innovative as this."
Shocking, indeed. OpenCourseWare (OCW) is "an effort combining the openness of a public library with the academic intensity of a university," and, in the words of Vest, it combines "world-class research and world-class teaching" with the World Wide Web. OCW 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 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 OCW for their own courses.
The
OCW Web site: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html officially launched its pilot program in the fall of 2002 with the help of US$11 million from the William and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations (and $1 million from MIT). It contains free lecture notes, syllabi, reading lists, course calendars, exam and quiz questions (and sometimes answers), labs, and some video lectures for undergraduate and graduate courses.
At its launch, the site contained 50 courses and, currently, according to OCW senior strategist Steve Carson, there are just over 1,400 courses available on the site, with 210 replaced with updated versions. Ultimately, OCW hopes to have 2,000 courses posted by 2008, and it seems well on its way to reaching that goal.
To access the OCW site, one does not need to register; all content is free and available for everyone. Users worldwide have accessed the site, with the help of nearly 80 mirror sites on university campuses around the world (54 in Africa and 10 in East Asia). This includes nearly-translated courses on four different sites offering translations in Spanish, Portuguese, traditional Chinese, and simplified Chinese. The OCW usage statistics show that 43 percent of the site hits come from North America, 21 percent from Western Europe, and 15 percent from East Asia. But these demographics constantly shift. For instance, China, Israel and India were the countries (outside the U.S.) with the most hits in November 2005.
According to an April 4, 2006, press release, "There have been nearly 20 million unique visits to MIT OCW content since Oct. 1, 2003. In February alone there were an average of more than 36,000 visits to the site daily." OCW access data shows that visitors to the site fit three general profiles: educators (16 percent), students (31 percent) and self-learners (48 percent). Visitors utilize the site for various reasons, the most popular of which are enhancing personal knowledge; complementing a subject for which one is currently enrolled; and helping educators to plan, develop, or teach a cou
In 2005, MIT OpenCourseWare and other leading OCW projects formed the
OpenCourseWare Consortium (http://ocwconsortium.org/), which seeks to extend the reach and impact of opencourseware materials, foster new opencoursewares and develop sustainable models for opencourseware publication.
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