President Vest focused on how
OpenCourseWare reflected the idealism of
the MIT faculty and the core educational mission of MIT in
his remarks to print and television reporters.
"As president of MIT, I have come to
expect top-level innovative and intellectually entrepreneurial
ideas from the MIT community. When we established the Council on Educational Technology
at MIT, we charged a sub-group with coming up with a
project that reached beyond our campus classrooms.
"I have to tell you that we went into
this expecting that something creative, cutting-edge and
challenging would emerge. And, frankly, we also expected that
it would be something based on a revenue-producing model - a project or
program that took into account the power of the internet and
its potential for new applications in education.
 Result not
what has expected
"OpenCourseWare is
not exactly what I had expected. It is not what many people
may have expected. But it is typical of our
faculty to come up with something as bold and innovative as
this, " President Vest
commented.
"OpenCourseWare
looks counterintuitive in a market driven world. It goes against the grain of
current material values. But it really is consistent with what I
believe is the best about MIT. It is innovative. It
expresses our belief in the way education can be
advanced - by constantly widening access to information and
by inspiring others to participate," said President Vest. "Simply put, OpenCourseWare is
a natural marriage of American higher education and the capabilities of the
World Wide Web," he said.
President Vest
next spoke in anticipation of reporters' questions on topics
ranging from the role of OpenCourseWare on enrolment and quality of life
at MIT as well as its potential impact on revenue generating programs
and competition from other institutions.
Traditional openness and outreach
"OpenCourseWare combines
two things: the traditional openness and outreach and democratising influence
of American education and the ability of the Web to make
vast amounts of information instantly available.
"OpenCourseWare is firmly at the heart of MIT's educational mission: MIT
faculty have a deeply ingrained sense of service and
mission. They like to work on big problems and frankly,
they like to influence the world. There is an incredible idealism
in this faculty."
On
OpenCourseWare's impact on education at MIT, President Vest commented, "We believe OpenCourseWare
will have a strong impact on a residential learning
at MIT and elsewhere. Let me be clear: We are not providing
an MIT education on the Web. We are providing
our core materials that are the infrastructure that undergirds an
MIT education. Real education requires interaction, the interaction that is part
of American teaching.
"We think that OpenCourseWare
will make it possible for faculty here and elsewhere
to concentrate even more on the actual process of teaching,
on the interactions between faculty and students that are the real
core of learning.
MIT's enrolment will suffer?
"Am I worried that the OpenCourseWare project
will hurt MIT's enrolment? No. In fact, I am
absolutely confident that providing this world wide window onto an
MIT education, showing what we teach, may be
a very good thing for attracting prospective students," President Vest
said.
"How will OpenCourseWare relate to revenue generating educational
projects at MIT? I do believe that revenue generating distance
education will have a role in the world and
will probably have a role at MIT. It is clear
to me that revenue generating opportunities are there,
for example, for professionals learning about new developments in their
field.
"There's the possibility of developing courses in the
humanities or the arts, for example, for retirees or for
people who have wanted to go back to school
for a long time. A lot of opportunities are out
there to make money. But I want to
emphasise that there is no commercially available MIT degree," he
declared.
As for the likely role of
other universities, President Vest emphasised the idealism behind OpenCourseWare.
"This is about something bigger than MIT. I hope
other universities will see us as educational leaders in this
arena, and we very much hope that OpenCourseWare will draw
other universities to do the same. We would be
delighted if over time we have a world wide web
of knowledge that raises the quality of learning,
and ultimately, the quality of life, around the globe," he
asserted.
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Contributors to the
decision
Sitting beside
President Vest at the press conference were Steven Lerman,
professor of civil engineering and chair of the MIT faculty;
Harold Abelson, Class of 1922 professor of electrical
engineering and computer science and MacVicar Teaching Fellow;
and Dick K. P. Yue, associate dean of the school of
engineering and professor of ocean engineering.
Professor Lerman
noted the potential of OpenCourseWare to teach and to train
students and young faculty in developing countries and said,
"We hope our materials will be translated. Developing
countries need information, and they need to develop
infrastructure and institutions."
Professor Yue based
his vision of OpenCourseWare on his own experience as a boy in
Hong Kong who was inspired by an MIT textbook his father gave
him. "MIT will miss its goal if it reaches just the students
within its walls and not in the larger world," he
said.
"OpenCourseWare
stimulates real reflection on what we're doing in the
classroom. If my students get all their raw materials on the
web, what am I doing in class? This also makes it possible for
faculty colleagues to keep up with one another's work and
research," remarked Professor Abelson.
Teaching innovations will
follow
Professor Abelson
also noted that the pioneering new program may set in motion
innovations in teaching. Once students begin acquiring course
content on the web, faculty will be able to pay more attention
to the actual process of teaching. OpenCourseWare will enable
faculty to concentrate on using classroom or lab time to
enhance learning, he said.
The OpenCourseWare
project will begin as a large scale pilot program over the
next two years. The first steps include design of the software
and services needed to support such a large endeavour, as well
as protocols to monitor and assess its utilisation by faculty
and students at MIT and throughout the world. By the end of
the two-year period, it is expected that materials for more
than 500 courses would be available on the MIT OpenCourseWare
site.
MIT sees a variety
of benefits coming from the MIT OpenCourseWare project:
 Institutions
around the world could make direct use of the MIT
OpenCourseWare materials as references and sources for
curriculum development. These materials might be of particular
value in developing countries that are trying to expand their
higher education systems rapidly.
Individual
learners could draw upon the materials for self study or
supplementary use.
The
MIT OpenCourseWare infrastructure could serve as a model for
other institutions that choose to make similar content open
and available.
Over
time, if other universities adopt this model, a vast
collection of educational resources will develop and
facilitate widespread exchange of ideas about innovative ways
to use those resources in teaching and learning.
MIT OpenCourseWare
will serve as a common repository of information and channel
of intellectual activity that can stimulate educational
innovation and cross-disciplinary educational ventures.
MIT's leadership in
educational innovation
The program will
continue the tradition of MIT's leadership in educational
innovation, as exemplified by the engineering science
revolution in the 1960s. At that time, MIT engineering faculty
radically revised their curricula and produced new textbooks
that brought the tools of modern science, mathematics, and
computing into the core of the engineering curriculum. As
their students joined the engineering faculties of
universities throughout the country, they took with them their
own course notes from MIT, and spread the new approach to
engineering education.
In similar spirit,
but with new technologies, MIT OpenCourseWare will make it
possible to quickly disseminate new knowledge and educational
content in a wide range of fields. President Vest commented
that the idea of OpenCourseWare is particularly appropriate
for a research university such as MIT, where ideas and
information move quickly from the laboratory into the
educational program, even before they are published in
textbooks.
MIT believes that
implementation of OpenCourseWare will complement and stimulate
innovation in ways that may not even be envisioned at this
point. "We expect that MIT OpenCourseWare will raise the tide
of educational innovation within MIT and elsewhere," said MIT
Provost Robert A. Brown "By making up-to-date educational
content widely available," he said, "OpenCourseWare will focus
faculty efforts on teaching and learning on their campuses. It
also will facilitate a new style of national and global
collaboration in education through the sharing of educational
content and the potential of telecommunications for real-time
interactions."
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