An International Workshop
Creating the Information Commons for e-Science:
Toward Institutional Policies and Guidelines for Action
UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, France
1-2 September 2005

OpenCourseWare, MIT

Steve Carson
OCW Senior Strategist

In 2001, Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it would be publishing the core teaching materials---including syllabi, lecture notes, homework, projects and exams--from all 1,800 of its courses freely and openly on the world wide web for use by teachers and learners from around the word. Four years later, MIT OpenCourseWare has published materials from 1,100 of the 1,800 courses, and is on schedule to complete the publication as planned in 2008. To date, the site has received more than 8 million visits--and an additional 3 million visits to translations of MIT OCW content--from 224 different countries. Since the announcement of the MIT OCW project, more than thirty higher education institutions in the United States, Japan, China, India, and Vietnam have adopted the opencourseware sharing model and now share their course materials openly; a similar number of institutions have projects in development. This presentation describes the vision, implementation and outcomes of the MIT OpenCourseWare project; places it in context of other efforts to share Open Educational Resources; and provides early indications of the direction of the global OpenCourseWare movement.

For more information, visit http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html.