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April 4, 2001 Auditing Classes at M.I.T.,
on the Web and Free
By CAREY GOLDBERG CAMBRIDGE, Mass.,
Other universities may be striving to market
their courses to the Internet masses in hopes of dot-com wealth.
But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has chosen the
opposite path: to post virtually all its course materials
on the Web, free to everybody.
M.I.T. plans on Wednesday to announce a 10-year initiative,
apparently the biggest of its kind, that intends to create
public Web sites for almost all of its 2,000 courses and to
post materials like lecture notes, problem sets, syllabuses,
exams, simulations, even video lectures. Professors' participation
will be voluntary, but the university is committing itself
to post sites for all its courses, at a cost of up to $100
million. Visitors will not earn college credits.
The giveaway idea, President Charles M. Vest of M.I.T. said,
came in a "traditional Eureka moment" as the institute - like
nearly every other university - brainstormed and soul-searched
about how best to take advantage of the Internet.
Called OpenCourseWare, the initiative found
broad resonance among the faculty members, said Steven Lerman,
the faculty chairman. "Selling content for profit, or trying
in some ways to commercialize one of the core intellectual
activities of the university," Professor Lerman said, "seemed
less attractive to people at a deep level than finding ways
to disseminate it as broadly as possible."
Universities have been flocking into "distance
learning" - offering courses online to off-campus paying students
- and commercial ventures have been investing tens of millions
of dollars in the idea. But those ventures tend to pick and
choose among courses and professors, rather than trying to
offer a whole university in one swoop. At the same time, on
campus, universities have begun creating a great many course
Web sites. The University of California at Los Angeles creates
a site for every undergraduate course. But those are generally
only for internal use, and the M.I.T. initiative appears to
dwarf even those internal programs.
"I think everybody else besides M.I.T. is
in the position of being more cautious," and watching to see
what Internet strategy works best, said David Brady, vice
provost for learning technologies at Stanford University.
A software entrepreneur in Washington, D.C., Michael Saylor,
pledged $100 million to create an online free university a
year ago, but he would build it from scratch, and the value
of his stock has plummeted. M.I.T.'s plan differs from Mr.
Saylor's, President Vest said: "For one thing, it's going
to happen."
Another difference between the M.I.T. plan
and other Internet initiatives is that it makes no effort
to offer full-fledged, for-credit courses online. Rather,
it will offer course materials as ingredients of learning
that can then be combined with teacher-student interaction
somewhere else - or simply explored by, say, professors in
Chile or precocious high school students in Bangladesh.
Still, is the institute worried that M.I.T.
students will balk at paying about $26,000 a year in tuition
when they can get all their materials online? "Absolutely
not," Dr. Vest said. "Our central
value is people and the human experience of faculty working
with students in classrooms and laboratories, and students
learning from each other, and the kind of intensive environment
we create in our residential university." "I don't
think we are giving away the direct value, by any means, that
we give to students," he said. "But I think we will help other
institutions around the world."
Most of the 940 or so faculty members support the plan, Professor
Lerman and others said, but some have reservations. Some argued
that the institute would be giving away a valuable asset that
could be used to subsidize the residential students.
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(The question of whether university knowledge
can be turned into online gold remains a big one, however;
most firms that are trying it, Dr. Vest said, have encountered
"much rougher sailing" than expected.)
Other faculty skeptics questioned whether it would be a good
use of professors' time to labor over Web sites, and still
others have questioned whether sub-par Web sites might not
end up reflecting badly on M.I.T.
Then there is the question of intellectual property, already
a thorny one in academia as the promise of Internet riches
exacerbates the question of who owns the electronic rights
to a professor's lectures and research. Some professors, Mr.
Lerman said, may end up having two Web sites: one for internal
use with, say, large portions of a soon-to-be- published textbook,
and one for external use. But he and others said that issues
of intellectual property had surfaced little in the months
of faculty discussion of the initiative. Rather, they said,
a willingness, even an eagerness, to share appeared to dominate.
"This is a natural fit to what the Web is really all about,"
Dr. Vest said. "We've learned this lesson over and over again.
You can't have tight, closed-up systems. We've tried to open
up software infrastructure in a variety of ways and that's
what unleashed the creativity of software developers; I think
the same thing can happen in education."
In fact, M.I.T. is a hotbed of the "open source" software
movement; and this new Internet initiative is based on a similar
idea, said Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science and
engineering who is involved in both.
"Fundamentally, they proceed from the same ethic, which has
to do with sharing," Professor Abelson said. "In the Middle
Ages people built cathedrals, where the whole town would get
together and make a thing that's greater than any individual
person could do and the society would kind of revel in that.
We don't do that as much anymore, but in a sense this is kind
of like building a cathedral."
The initiative is to begin with a two-year pilot program to
put materials from more than 500 courses on the Web, work
to be done by a combination of professional staff and teaching
assistants.
One of the advantages of the initiative, M.I.T. officials
said, will be that it will unite all the posted courses in
one electronic place, allowing students to see how they flow
into each other, to search the whole repository and to jump
from one to the next when they cross- reference each other.
Professor Abelson and others estimated that at most 20 percent
of professors already have substantive Web sites for their
courses. University officials said they were not worried that,
with extensive course materials posted online, students would
be less likely to come to class. In fact, the university's
provost, Robert A. Brown, said, when course materials are
already posted, "it pushes the faculty in the direction of
`How do I best use the contact hours so that people learn?'
which is clearly critical."
Over all, the vision for 10 years from now,
Provost Brown said, was "a world in which you'll find students
able to search what will be huge repositories of content"
and "they'll be able to use content from many places educationally,
and we'll be using other people's as much as they'll be using
ours."
Dr. Vest said he did not rule out the possibility that M.I.T.
might seek to develop profit-oriented Web programs in the
future. But as for this initiative, he said, he suspected
its greatest impact might come overseas, among institutions
that cannot attract world-class faculty. "I also suspect,"
he said, "in this country and throughout the world, a lot
of really bright, precocious high school students will find
this a great playground." And ultimately, he said, "there
will probably be a lot of uses that will really surprise us
and that we can't really predict."
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