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"I came to MIT because it was a free, open environment. It's not that any longer. I wouldn't enroll in the kind of place MIT is becoming."
This complaint from a graduating senior last spring was in reaction to the increasing fraction of MIT course Websites that are restricted so that only students taking the class can view them. When Websites for MIT courses began appearing in the '90s, almost all of these were openly viewable by anyone at MIT or around the world. There are still many open sites, but the overall picture is changing as we deploy institutional support for course Websites. Last spring, MIT's centrally supported Stellar system http://stellar.mit.edu hosted about 225 course Websites. Of these, two-thirds had access restricted so that they were viewable only by students in the class, or with special permission from the instructor.
It's easy to shrug off these restrictions in the name of instructor choice, saying that it's up to each instructor to determine who can view the Website. MIT course management systems give instructors control over site access, both for the site as a whole and for fine-grained control over access to the individual parts of the site.
But granted that access is determined by instructor choice, it's curious to contrast Stellar's Website access patterns with Sloanspace http://sloanspace.mit.edu, the course management system for the Sloan School. Last spring, about 125 of Sloan's 160 courses had Sloanspace Websites. Of these, 5 percent required explicit permission to access the site. The rest were open to everyone in the Sloan community.
Why do Sloan faculty choose to open 95 percent of their course sites to the Sloan community, while two-thirds of Stellar sites are restricted to class members only? Are there crucial differences in the technical designs of the two course management systems? Is there something special about the faculty support provided for one system versus the other? Or does difference lie not in technology at all, but rather in Sloan's self-image as a community compared with that of MIT as a whole?
We speak a lot at MIT about community, about the unique nature of the MIT community, and about things we can do to enhance our community. Is how we share course information across the MIT community a proper part of that discussion? The physical space a community inhabits has enormous influence on the nature of the community. The same is true for information space, where a Web-based collaboration tool like a course management system becomes a lens for revealing community values, as well as a lever for changing those values.
"Out there on the electronic frontier, code is the law," wrote Bill Mitchell in City of Bits (1995). Larry Lessig took up this theme in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999) to explain that a computer system's information architecture serves as a kind of regulation. The default system configuration, the difficulty of selecting one setting rather than another, even subtle cues in wording or presentation, can shape people's behavior in an information society just as effectively as laws and policies formally enacted.
What Website access policies do we want? Should faculty be able to casually examine each others' course materials on the Web? Should MIT students be permitted, even encouraged, to browse course Websites at will, or should this require instructor permission? Or alternatively, should course sites be private resources for the class students and faculty, that privacy helping perhaps to reinforce the intimacy of the classroom experience?
Perhaps there's no need for community access to course Websites. After all, MIT has made an institutional commitment to public access through OpenCourseWare. OpenCourseWare sites aren't actual classes in progress - they've been edited so that MIT can publish them to the world – but sites designed for the general public might be adequate for MIT community members not in the class.
Roz Williams, in Retooling (2002), describes the dilemma faced by the MIT Office of Information Systems in designing a class-list management system for the registrar. The very question of creating a central data service forced the group to articulate institutional policy about who is an official member of an MIT class, and, as Williams writes, "shine a light on inconsistencies between practices, behaviors, and policies."
With course management systems, we're shining that light onto practices that go beyond the registrar's official list: Are our classes experiences for class members only, or do they have a role as community resource, and if so, for which community? How widely is course information shared across departments, schools, and the Institute? Should members of the MIT community have special access to course materials that we do not publish to the world?
And as we deploy these systems, we're implementing policies on sharing and openness that are shaping the kind of place MIT will become. I'd like to think that we'll remain the kind of community where my student would still want to enroll.
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