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spotlight: Open books, open minds | |||||||||||||||||||||||
MIT continues its tradition of open education |
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OpenCourseWare welcomes 50 million visitors: MIT's ambitious program hits key milestone MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) has now shared MIT course materials with more than 50 million visitors worldwide, indicating how OCW has grown from a bold idea into a global movement that is reshaping the role of the university in the digital age. Launched in 2002, OCW is MIT's ambitious program to share course materials -- including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams -- from virtually all of the Institute's classes, freely and openly on the Web. Through the main MIT OpenCourseWare site (http://ocw.mit.edu) and through translation affiliate sites, OCW materials have been accessed by an estimated 50 million individuals from more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. The OCW site alone has been visited by more than 30 million individuals, who have viewed more than 350 million pages. Affiliates have translated more than 600 of OCW's 1,800 courses into languages including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Thai and Persian. OCW has also inspired hundreds of other universities to share their course materials openly. Leading universities from more than 20 countries have come together through the OpenCourseWare Consortium (http://ocwconsortium.org) to publish a body of more than 7,800 courses in six different languages. Videos from the OCW site are available through Apple's iTunes U, which has recorded 1.7 million file downloads of OCW content, and on YouTube, where they have been viewed more than 1.2 million times. "To most people outside, MIT was like the forbidden city. They had no idea what happened inside," says MIT physics professor Walter Lewin. "And with OCW, the bridge was lowered. They now see MIT in a completely different way." Refining open education: new book is free online In the spirit of open education, MIT Press and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have published a new book about the movement and made it available online, free of charge. The book, Opening Up Education, contains a collection of essays about the benefits and challenges of creating open-education programs. Such initiatives typically put course content online, in the form of lecture notes and multimedia presentations. "But it's not about just making things freely available," said Toru Iiyoshi, one of the book's editors and a consulting scholar for the Carnegie Foundation. It's also about "making things more transparent ... so that people can better understand how to improve education." Ultimately, Iiyoshi hopes the book promotes conversation between the three groups who work in open education: technologists, content creators and educators. According to Vijay Kumar, co-editor of the book and director of MIT's Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, open education is needed now more than ever, in part to keep education relevant to a new generation of students. A lot of informal learning is going on via social networks. There are also growing communities of students who wish to learn but cannot be supported by traditional infrastructure. The electronic edition of the book is available freely online under a Creative Commons license. A print edition is also available from the MIT Press. MIT helps launch interactive video education project in Jordan Two MIT professors traveled to Jordan this month to help kick off a new initiative called Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies (BLOSSOMS), a joint international collaboration of educators from the United States, Jordan and Pakistan. BLOSSOMS aims to develop a large, free repository of science and math interactive video modules for high school students created by gifted volunteer teachers from around the world, seeded initially by MIT faculty members and partnering educators in Jordan and Pakistan. The project seeks to develop deeper and richer skills in high school students, to enhance their critical-thinking skills and to motivate them to pursue careers in science, math or engineering. During IAP, BLOSSOMS is sponsoring a contest for MIT students (undergraduate and graduate) to create designs for video modules. Two winning designs will be taped and included in the repository of BLOSSOMS videos. learn more at the IAP website. |
 MIT's OpenCourseWare welcomes 50 million visitors
 Opening up education essay collection is available free online
 Blossoms: student video contest during IAP |
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