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In a press conference held on April 4, 2001, MIT announced its commitment to make the materials associated with virtually all its courses freely available on the World Wide Web for non-commercial use (see http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/ocw.html). This new initiative, dubbed MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), reflects our institutional commitment to sharing knowledge across the globe. This article is intended to update the faculty on where OCW now stands, and what the plans are for this program.
OCW stands in stark contrast to many initiatives in the private sector and by other universities that are attempting to use the "intellectual capital" of academia on the Web as a revenue source. We envision OCW not as an alternative to the intensive, residentially-based education we now provide our students. Instead, OCW is much more in the tradition of faculty publishing textbooks. We see OCW as providing a way to share our thinking about the content of a modern curriculum in all the areas in which MIT excels. Users of this site may include other academics around the world and individual learners who may not have access to high quality educational materials. As faculty members, our participation in OCW is entirely voluntary, and we will have the final say on what goes into OCW for the courses we teach.
Following the announcement of OCW last April, the Provost appointed the MIT OCW Implementation Task Force. Chaired by Professor Dick Yue and drawing on the assistance of Booz-Allen & Hamilton Consultants, this group studied the organization and implementation of MIT OCW. This team interviewed administrators and faculty across the Institute to understand what we collectively wanted from OCW, and more importantly, what we didn’t want.
The Task Force also designed preliminary processes of how OCW might operate. These processes for the production of Websites for our courses drew upon benchmarks from other academic institutions and production organizations.
Among the many recommendations this study group made is the idea that OCW should not be a monolithic, centralized organization. Instead, based on what we heard from the faculty, OCW should be a hybrid organization, with a substantial portion of its staff located in the academic departments. The faculty appeared comfortable with the idea that functions such as management of the overall initiative, computer systems operations, and individuals with specialized skills such as graphic design, should be centralized. However, the day-to-day people in the OCW organization who help the faculty create Websites for their respective courses should reside within the departments they serve. The OCW organization now being created will be developed from this guiding principle.
The Implementation Task Force recommended that OCW be managed by a full-time Executive Director to be recruited through a national search. This individual will report to the Office of the Provost and would have a Faculty Advisory Board appointed by the Provost.
A group of us also worked with the MIT senior administration and the Development Office on securing funding for the first phase of OCW. In late June, MIT announced that we received approval for grants of $11 million for the first 27 months of the OCW initiative (see http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/ocw.html). The grants come equally from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In addition, MIT has committed $1 million over the next two years for the support of OCW. These funds should be sufficient for the ramp-up of the program to the point at which the OCW organization can create new Websites for 500 courses per year, the steady state production level for MIT.
Concurrent with the successful funding of the first part of OCW, in July the Provost appointed an MIT OCW Interim Management Board (IMB), which I chair. The IMB is charged with the mission of searching for a permanent Executive Director for OCW and of setting the OCW program in motion. The Board includes Marc Kastner (head of Physics), Vijay Kumar (assistant provost and head of Academic Computing), Ann Wolpert (director of Libraries) and Dick Yue (associate dean of Engineering). This group selected an outside recruiting firm, Isaacson-Miller, to assist it in the search for the Executive Director. As of the writing of this article in early October 2001, we are beginning the round of initial interviews with selected candidates.
Now that a national search for an Executive Director is under way, we are beginning the second task. The Interim Management Board decided to create a Transition Project Team to launch a preliminary pilot phase of OCW. The goal of this early phase is to investigate the processes that will be required for the successful production of the final OCW Website. The team, co-lead by Kyung Han (a former Booz-Allen consultant who worked with the Implementation Task Force) and Laura Koller (a research staff member at the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives) will design a set of draft templates for OCW course materials that will accommodate the diverse range of pedagogical styles in use at MIT. They will also develop a preliminary set of production processes for converting source materials provided by faculty members to OCW compatible formats. These processes will be designed to maximize the usefulness of the converted materials in the regular teaching of MIT courses so that professors see direct benefits from participating in OCW.
The Transition Project Team will initially work intensively with a few MIT academic departments to begin the process of converting a portion of those departments’ course materials to the preliminary OCW format and placing those materials on an interim OCW Web server. The team will include individuals assigned specifically to these pilot departments, as well as departmental personnel already in place who might be available to assist the Team under OCW funding. At the end of this phase, we hope to have materials from roughly 30 courses on the pilot OCW Web server. The majority of the course materials will be the result of working with one or two academic departments and a selection of diverse courses from around the Institute.
Over the next semester, OCW will transition from its current, temporary staff and oversight structure to a permanent part of MIT. This will involve a substantial effort to recruit the best people we can find to the initiative and to develop a service-oriented approach to working with the faculty. The task of creating a highly visible Website that draws together the materials with virtually all of MIT’s course offerings is a considerable one. However, the sense among the vast majority of the faculty with whom I have spoken is that it is entirely consistent with MIT’s long-standing approach to using the contributions of the faculty and new technology for broad, societal benefit. We have every reason to be proud of MIT for committing itself to this "high road" approach to educational technology.
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