Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “MIT OpenCourseWare: The foundation of free access to education”.
Thank you all for uh joining us here today. As president of mit. I have come to expect top level innovative and intellectually entrepreneurial ideas from the mit community. When we established several months ago, the council on educational technology, at mit, we charged a subgroup with coming up with a project that would reach beyond the boundaries of our campus beyond our classrooms. And i have to tell you that we went into this. Expecting that something creative and cutting edge and challenging would emerge something that would be consistent with mit’s mission. But frankly, i assumed – and i think most people assumed that it would also be something that would be based on a revenue producing model, a project or program that would somehow take into account the power of the imp of the internet and its potential for new applications.
In education, but i must admit that open courseware is not exactly what i had expected and it’s not what anybody else expected either, but it is very typical of our faculty to come up with something truly creative and different. Let me explain: how’s everyone doing come on. Let’S do better than that. How is everyone doing? Thank you. So mit opencourseware is a free sharing of the materials from the mit classroom, primarily with the whole world. It’S a permanent collection and archive of those materials that people can use at any time they see fit.
So it’s set up for self-paced learning, for people to download, remix and reuse the materials for whatever projects that they happen to be getting into ocw. Is this remarkable incarnation of the values of mit mit sense of mission, mit sense of purpose? This sense of openness and sharing of how we teach welcome to mit 6 goes back much longer than 20 years. If you go back to the founding with william barton rogers, all through the 1870s and 1880s, he traveled by train up and down the eastern seaboard, helping other universities figure out how to teach with mind and hand the way mit does come to the 60s.
A group of mit faculty shared the physics curriculum called pssc, broadly all around the world, with the technologies of the sixties. We now have two ideas about life, wave and particles, which is right and what pioneers like chuck, vest and hal abelson and dick you and steve lerman. What they all realized in the early 2000s was that we could now do this on a grand scale. 2. 500 courses, that was their vision and it’s been realized.
It’S made an amazing impact on literally millions of lives, and it’s something that mit is very, very proud of. Well. For me, everything about opencourseware has been good. Teaching at mit is a wonderful job, but to have it go outside mit much farther than mit is extra special. They all lie on a straight line. This is a linear well thinking about 20 years ago. The idea of doing video lectures was somehow in the air. So i i just welcomed that chance to show what linear algebra what the subject was doing and at the same time it was showing what mit is doing and what opencourseware could could offer all right.
Everyone, let’s get started. It’S such a positive thing for education to be free and to be open and to be worldwide. I came from a place where finding a good education is hardly possible during three years of civil war. All universities were closed in my city and ocw was the place to get my education from because of this knowledge that i gained, i participated in building a prosthetic hand to help the war affected people and i’m now student of an elite master program at one of The top rated university in europe as the first libyan student to be represented at this point, opencourseware, has delivered well more than a billion minutes of learning on its website and the growth of our youtube channel, which has the largest subscription base for any edu on youtube. I think is a testament to the global interest in learning and to me, what’s also remarkable, is that opencourseware was the first of its kind, but much has followed it and is today the foundation of a much broader, open educational resources, ecosystem of different people in different Educational institutions producing and sharing and repurposing and reusing materials that are available to everyone on earth and at present we at mit, are in the middle of building designing a new platform that will take mit into its second 20 years. At the time it was founded. President vest said this idea to him was a surprise. It’S not a surprise anymore.
It’S baked into the fabric of mit ocw is just it’s a part of what we do open. Courseware may seem a bit counter-intuitive in a market-driven world, but it really is consistent with what i believe is the very best in mit. It’S great service orientation. It’S innovative! It expresses our belief in the way that education can be advanced by constantly widening access to knowledge and information and by inspiring others to participate simply put open.
Courseware is a natural marriage of american higher education and the capabilities of the world wide web. You .