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MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative is great, and I remain enthusiastic, although a little more worried since reading Steven Lerman’s OCW [Open Courseware] update in October’s Faculty Newsletter. What I read suggested OCW might be falling to two of our baser urges, which, to sound more like a typical newsletter contributor, I’ll call Marxist and Fascist.
Lerman was writing in the Faculty Newsletter, where the discourse is all too frequently Marxist. But Lerman is no Chomsky. So I was surprised to read that OCW aims to make “virtually all its courses freely available on the World Wide Web for non-commercial use… 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.”
This is like saying that MIT aims to save the world with both hands tied behind its back.
Commerce is what makes the world go round. What academia calls “the private sector” feeds, houses, clothes, transports, entertains, and most effectively educates the vast majority of people, and especially the prosperous ones, which is no coincidence.
OCW should be looking for ways to harness the demonstrated powers of free people, free markets, and free enterprise to make the most of MIT’s intellectual capital. Lerman likens OCW to text books, but even these are published commercially. Marxism is a religion and deserves its slot at the MIT Chapel, but not at the core of OCW.
Now, to Lerman’s revelation of OCW’s Fascist urge. Lerman wrote that OCW will “design a set of draft templates for OCW course materials” and “production processes for converting source materials provided by faculty members to OCW compatible formats.” Of course in the long term having high production values will be essential to a successful OCW, but we have to be careful, especially now, not to have rigid standards for including course content.
Initially, working to incorporate non-standard content from far and wide will accelerate OCW’s getting to critical mass. Longer term, rigid standards for content inclusion will deter innovation. Let’s not be Fascist about what course content qualifies for OCW. Let’s be inclusive not exclusive.
Maybe by now I’m not sounding like an OCW enthusiast. But I am. It’s just that I want MIT to succeed with OCW. I don’t want to be reading about OCW’s good intentions amidst the continual whining in The MIT Faculty Newsletter, but about its great success in The Wall Street Journal.
Ed. Note: The Faculty Newsletter encourages responses to the above article, as well as contributions on subjects of interest to the faculty and the MIT community. You can reach us at fnl@mit.edu.
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