http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/technology/04MIT.html

April 4, 2001

NEW YORK TIMES

Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free

By CAREY GOLDBERG

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 3 - 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. (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."

************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
*************************************************************************************