MIT to make course materials available free on the World Wide Web

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/ocw.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/technology/04MIT.html (free registration required)

 

I'm a bit surprised this is not receiving any comment.

It drives a horse and cart through most of the commercial plans to offer DL courses by realising that its ultimately the teacher not the materials which make the difference.

The anti-education lobby led by Druker et al must be a bit preplexed to finfd that educationalists actually still believe in education for all and not cash flows and share options.

 

My latest article is about this -- see http://distancelearn.about.com/library/weekly/aa040601a.htm for links to the MIT OpenCourseWare demo site and related resources.

It is an interesting development -- by making all its course materials available, MIT might set a model for what web-based courses.

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Kristin Evenson Hirst
DistanceLearn.About.com

 

Something like this MIT proposal already exists in the U. of Texas' 'World Lecture Hall'. The WLH collects links to many hundreds of courses with on-line materials. They range from bare-bones syllabi to elaborate full-text lecture notes with graphics, additional readings and more. It's broken down by subject, with dozens to literally hundreds of courses for each subject.

It's kind of a free university for those who don't need instruction or academic credit.
http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture/

 

MIT's intention is that anyone (in (education/non profit making) can use the materials as part of their courses.

MIT have extensive deals within the UK and Ireland as well so it seems to be saying here is the content, now use it in your teaching.

where does that leave the commercial DL outfits who believe teachers are bit irrelevant and can be hired very cheaply?

 

That may be the MIT administration's intention, but I would be interested in seeing how it actually turns out in practice.

What kind of content? I can see serious intellectual property issues arising from this. Faculty often draw on their own work. They teach research which they intend to publish. Or they use their students as sort of beta-testers for the texts that they are in the process of writing. They commonly use journal articles and other copyright material in their classes under fair use provisions which would be violated if that material were published free for the general public.

So I'm going to speculate that when this really happens, if it ever does, it will turn out to be little more than the bare syllabi and class notes that are already on-line now. Much of the real content, the intellectual property, still won't be freely available.

I think that it is apples and oranges. I would be really surprised if most of these MIT course webpages resemble the elaborate interactive courseware that academic pubishers are currrently working on.

The latter will be very complex hyper-textbooks, and I just don't see MIT putting in the huge effort to create that kind of thing for every course, or allowing that kind of content to escape into the public domain.

I do think that there is a message here though. The message seems to be that MIT is opting out of the rush to distance education. They are making this highly pubicized initiative instead of putting in real distance education degree programs.

 

That's an interesting take and the opposite to how its being viewed on this side of the pond.