Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Course Ware (OCW)

“A faculty member at a new engineering university in Ghana, a precocious high-school biology student in suburban Chicago, a political scientist in Poland, a literature professor in upstate New York, or an executive in a management seminar down the hall at MIT will all be able to use the materials our professors rely on in teaching our full-time students. Together they will build a web of knowledge that will enhance human learning worldwide. That is the goal of MIT's OCW.”

Charles M. Vest, President MIT, 2004.

The Massachusetts Institute Technology Open Courseware (MIT OCW) is an initiative by the institution to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate and graduate level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone anywhere by the end of 2007 (Wikipedia, 2007).

History:

The project grew out of the MIT Council on Education Technology, a faculty committee, which was charged by MIT provost Robert Brown in 1999 with determining how MIT should position itself in the distance learning/e-learning environment. Initially, the committee’s members assumed that MIT would want to pursue a web-based business model. However, after conducting their analysis of the market research in that area, the committee concluded that a revenue-generating distance-education model was not viable for MIT (Vest, 2004).

The decision may have been influenced in part by the fact that venture capital for internet business models was hard to come by after the collapse of several dot com enterprises in the spring of 2000. A fee-based model would require significant investment and draw limited resources from existing or urgently needed programs at that the time. This might explain why the committee members were willing to consider the principles of opensource systems, by using the Internet to give away its teaching materials (Vest, 2004). The project was announced in 2001 and opened to the public in September 2002 (Wikipedia, 2007).

The proposal was welcomed by the University administration and was championed by then MIT President Charles M. Vest. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT are jointly funding the project.

The OCW has two objectives in its mandate:

• To provide free access to virtually all MIT course materials for educators, students, and individual learners around the world

• To create an efficient, standards-based model which other universities may emulate to publish their own course materials

Content:

MIT’s OCW offers open access to syllabi, lecture notes, course calendars, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists and a selection of video lectures. In 2004, 701 courses were available, representing materials from 33 academic disciplines and almost half of MIT’s 950 faculty members (MIT, 2004). In January 2007, the number of materials had increased to 1400 MIT courses representing 34 departments in all five of MIT schools (Peek, 2007). By the end of 2008 the material catalogue is expected to expand to 2000 courses (MIT, 2004).

Users:

In 2004, the website had over 11,000 visits a day and nearly a quarter-million unique visitors a month (MIT, 2004). That same year, MIT undertook a survey of those visitors to find out where they were located and how they were using the courseware. The results were as follows:

• 45% of these visitors are from the United States and Canada.

• Outside North America, the top countries are China, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, and Brazil

• 52% of visitors identify themselves as “self-learners’

• 31% as students enrolled in a formal course of student

• 13% as educators

• 57% use it for course and curriculum development

• 33% to enhance their subject matter understanding or support research

• 7% for student advising

• 47% of the educators had been adapted for classroom use

• 41% of educators report they are considering adapting (MIT 2004).

Progress and Challenges:

The MIT OCW faces a number of challenges. Already the project has fallen short of its goal to have all of the undergraduate and graduate course materials online by 2007. The chief obstacle to meeting its mandate is managing the logistics involved in converting all the materials into a digital format suitable for online distribution.

With over 2000 courses, the OCW staff also have to determine ownership of the copyright and obtaining permission for publication for the intellectual property items that are embedded in the course materials of MIT’s faculty (Wikipedia, 2007). All copyright in OCW material remains with MIT, members of its faculty or its students. The materials are released under a Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial?-ShareAlike 2.5. Creative Commons defines the aspects of the license as follows:

• Attribution You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

• Noncommercial You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

• Share Alike If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

Therefore, under this agreement, users who download the MIT OCW materials are free to:

• To copy, distribute, display and perform the work

• To make derivative works

The most significant aspect of the license is the noncommercial clause that restricts users from profiting from the materials or any derivate works of the materials. “A commercial education or training business may not offer courses based on OCW materials if students pay a fee for those courses and the business intends to profit as a result.” (MIT OCW, 2007). For example, a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda will not be able to use the materials in his course because the university charges students for the courses. However, incidental charges are permitted, such as those to recover reproduction costs incurred in burning cds or paper copies. The number is restricted to under 1000 copies (MIT OCW, 2007).

Going Global: The OCW Consortium

In 2005, MIT OCW and other leading projects of the kind formed the OCW Consortium, which seeks to extend the reach and impact of OCW materials, foster new OCWs? and develop sustainable models for OCW publication (Wikipedia, 2007). The OCW Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model (OCW Consortium, 2007). “The mission of the OpenCourseWare? Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware. ” (OCW Consortium, 2007)

The Goals of the Consortium

• Extend the reach and impact of OCW by encouraging the adoption and adaptation of open educational materials around the world.

• Foster the development of additional OCW projects.

• Ensure the long-term sustainability of OCW projects by identifying ways to improve effectiveness and reduce costs.

Membership

In order to participate in Consortium activities, institutions must have committed to publishing, under the institution's name, materials from at least 10 courses in a format that meets the agreed-upon definition of an OCW and to make resources as available in support of Consortium goals. Organizations that do not publish their own materials, but whose activities further Consortium goals, also participate in Consortium activities. (OCW Consortium, 2007). One of its partners, Universia, is a consortium of more than 800 colleges and universities in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal that has translated a sample of 95 MIT OCW courses into Spanish and Portuguese (Peek, 2007). Another group, the Chinese Open Resources for Education (CORE), will translate all of MIT OCW’s courses into Chinese and offer open and free access to the course materials form Chinese educators, over the course of the next five years.

Implications for scholarly publishers:

Courseware is often used as a substitute for text books in many courses around the world. OCW is significantly different because it not simply a free compilation of already published materials; it is a publishing project in itself that is bringing new scholarly materials into the market. Publishers, particularly those who specialize in educational materials will therefore have taken notice of the OCW movement. While they presently rely on the fact that their authors are prominent academics, that leverage is undermined if those same academics have made their materials available for free with the OCW Consortium. Therefore, while publishers will be threatened by the fact that materials of an equivalent quality are now available for free, the true threat lies in the fact that MIT is now a publisher in its own right. By asking its instructors and students to publish their materials online for free, MIT makes it difficult for publishers to approach those instructors to create materials that they can sell.

Implications regarding the value of education:

“By making their educational materials openly available, MIT is demonstrating that they can give away such materials without threatening the value of an MIT education, or in other words, that there may be something in the educational process that cannot be captured in a book” (Wikipedia, 2007)

OCW does not propose to replace face-to-face interactions between instructors and students. Rather the project is focused on resources for instructors and students. This is a major factor in its relative success so far because faculty members at the participating universities do not OCW as an addition to the current system, but many would likely resist it as a replacement (Wikipedia, 2007).

MIT has demonstrated a confidence in its brand with the OCW project. The Times ranked the university 4th overall among the top 200 universities in the world in 2006 (Wikipedia, 2007). Indeed, it is unlikely that this project could succeed and gain international support if it were not for the established brand of a prominent institute. We should not however rush to assume that MIT is attempting to redefine the economics of education. The university continues to operate on a commercial model. What might change are the disparities between universities around the world as more instructors use the materials made available through the OCW Consortium. It will be interesting to see if there is standardization in course materials among different universities around the world.

Conclusion:

It is difficult to reconcile the goals of the MIT OCW with its Creative Commons License given the realities of education today. The project aims to provide free access to all MIT course materials for educators, students and individual learners around the world. However, use of the materials for educators is restricted to those who work for institutions that do not aim to profit from the services they offer. In many developing nations around the world, World Bank restructuring programs forced governments to transform public universities and colleges into commercial institutions. Over the years, these institutions have seen most of their academic facilities and standards deteriorate as a result of little or no investment or financial support from the public sector. Their educators and students have a great deal to gain from the OCW movement. However, the noncommercial restrictions of the creative commons license apply to these institutions since many of the students and educators who are positioned to take advantage of this project are likely to be found at institutions that are operating on a profit model. If MIT does not address this contradiction, the movement will be forced to turn a blind eye to the inevitable piracy of its materials in many regions of the world where the enforcement of the license is either impossible or impractical.

References:

Sources in Ebsco:

Kirkpatrick, Karie L.. Searcher, Nov/Dec2006, Vol. 14 Issue 10, p53-58, 6p, 2 diagrams.

Margulies, Anne H.. PLoS Biology, Aug2004, Vol. 2 Issue 8, p0-0, 3p

Peek, Robin. Information Today, Jan2007, Vol. 24 Issue 1, p15-16, 2p

Vest, Charles M. Why MIT Decided to Give Away All Its Course Materials via the Internet. Chronicle of Higher Education; 1/30/2004, Vol. 50 Issue 21, pB20-B21, 2p, 1c

Sources from the web:

Gardner, W. David, “MIT to put its entire curriculum online for free” EE Times, March 13, 2007. http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198000598&cid=RSSfeed_eetimes_newsRSS

MIT OpenCourseWare?, “MIT OCW” March 2007. Massachusetts Institute of Technology http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

MIT OCW Legal Notices, “MIT OCW Global Terms of Use” March 2007. Massachusetts Institute of Technology http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/terms-of-use.htm#noncomm

OpenCourseWare? Constortium, “About” March 2007. OCW Consortium http://ocwconsortium.org/

Wikiepdia, “MIT OCW” March 2007. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_OCW

Wikiepdia, “William and Flora Hewlett Foundation” March 2007. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_and_Flora_Hewlett_Foundation

Wikiepdia, “Andrew W. Mellon Foundation” March 2007. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_W._Mellon_Foundation

Fascinating --jmax, Thu, 19 Apr 2007 14:43:12 -0700 reply

Very nice treatment, Paschal. A number of points deserve comment:

First, a minor point: you wrote (or quoted?) that:

• 47% of the educators had been adapted for classroom use

Interesting idea.

Seriously, though, the issue of intellectual property is a huge one. Traditionally, universities in the West have left the intellectual property in the hands of faculty—among other things, this makes scholarly publishing possible in its current (that is, not institution-controlled) form. The formalization of course resources as published materials, though, has become a thorny issue as universities have pursued distance-ed offerering (and business models) in the past decade. At UBC a couple of years back, there was a legal battle between faculty and university over who owned the rights to faculty-authored materials (faculty won, that round at least). The UBC case was in the context of a for-profit distance-ed program. MIT's adoption of CC-NC/SA licensing puts a different spin on it. I'm especially intrigued by the suggestion that this may impact the ability of faculty to subsequently sell their works to commercial publishers! Not sure exactly who's benefiting here. MIT for sure. Are the faculty?

As for the pedagogical implications, the important point is that MIT is making a statement that the value of an MIT education has to do with being at MIT, not with access to the materials. A move possible for them to make. Would anyone care if Kwantlen College suddenly made the same statement? It's certainly a strong branding move. But then, we wouldn't be surprised if Oxford were to declare that all their written course resources were available free, would we?

Finally, you mention "piracy." I'm not sure the term applies. If the materials are openly available, then no one is in a position to pirate (that is, "steal") them. As for instititions who would take these CC materials and illegitimately charge for access to them, it seems to me this can happen only on a limited basis, because anyone with an Internet connection can get the exact same materials for free. The free availability basically undercuts the ability of anyone to charge a gatekeeper fee. So I'd suspect we see fee-based education to continue as it always has (as it does at MIT), but that the competitive advantage of one university over another must become based on criterial other than their access to course texts.

Yes?

Piracy --paschal, Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:58:23 -0700 reply

I take your point on the fact that piracy may not be the right term here. The term implies some sort of misappropriation though, and given the fact that MIT does not want the OCW to be used in a fee-based model of education, i think it can be used in that context...that is until a better term is put forward.

I might agree with your assertion that the piracy of these materials is not likely to happen widely, except that the reasoning you put forward leaves me wondering if you are thinking specifically about parts of the world where internet access is "easily" available. If so, i should then point out that i was thinking more of piracy in developing nations, as the commons license would be harder to enforce there anyway.

There is also the possibility that instructors may include the materials in their courses without declaring that they have done so to the institution for which they work. It does not have to be a grand conspiracy of universities colluding to make the most of MIT's generosity.