MIT course material available online free of charge
Vishnu K. Mahmud, Contributor, Jakarta
vmahmud@yahoo.com
When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced it was going to publish on the Internet all of its course materials in 2001, the IT and education world was shocked. Here was one of the world's premier (and costliest) technical institutions, and it was planning to give away its curriculum.
This actually goes against the prevailing business models for online education. Some universities are now offering a web-based education toward a bachelor's or master's degree. For MIT to actually surrender its information to the general public is akin to Bill Gates opening up the Windows source code for the world to share, modify and innovate (something which is highly unlikely).
Yet, with the recent launch of the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) website, MIT hopes to make its course materials available for use "in almost all undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world".
It hopes to assist the distribution of knowledge, philosophies and modes of thought to help enlighten the world, as well as to utilize the Web as a vehicle for education.
This is in line with MIT's mission to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century, and the institution's values of excellence, innovation and leadership.
It is important to note that these texts and documents do not replace nor constitute an MIT education (now estimated to cost roughly just under US$50,000 a year). OCW is not a form of distance learning. It mostly consists of syllabi, lecture notes, quizzes, tutorials a few streaming video lectures and reading lists; items useful for supporting an education. No college credit will be offered and no degree will be conferred.
The website insists that users are allowed to use, copy, distribute, translate and modify the MIT OCW materials for noncommercial educational purposes that are made freely available to other users under the terms defined by the MIT OCW legal notice. Copying the materials and charging for lessons based on them is a no-no.
MIT hopes that OCW will be useful for students around the world. The September issue of Wired Magazine (www.wired.com) recently profiled a number of students in the U.S., Ukraine and Vietnam using the course materials to help them excel in their current studies.
One of the undergraduate students learning at a local university in Tennessee was so inspired by a video lecture by Walter Lewin, a popular MIT physics professor, that he was prompted to delve deeper into the subject and its corresponding topics.
This "open source" style of education is a fresh breeze in the cynical world of restrictive patents, long-term copyrights and blatant profiteering that we see these days. There used to be a common goal for mankind to educate the masses. Today, only the few have knowledge and lord it over the rest who wallow in ignorance.
By allowing users to use, distribute and modify it materials, MIT is helping the world to think differently, out of the box as it were, to find solutions using new ideas and tomes. Perhaps other institutions will follow suit to allow an exchange of ideas harking back to the days of the Great Library of Alexandria.
Considering the many issues the Indonesian education system is facing, this can perhaps help students refocus their attention on their education, motivating them to collect wisdom instead of the latest mobile phone. Issues like interschool brawls, hazing and suppression of independent thought can be eradicated, allowing students to chart their futures with world-class course materials.
So far, a sampling of classes from 17 MIT departments is being offered as a pilot project. Course such as Problems of Philosophy, Laboratory in Software Engineering, Linear Algebra and Introduction to Marketing are just a few of the classes available. By 2007, virtually all of MIT's courses will be published online.
The MIT Open Course Ware website is at http://ocw.mit.edu.