3

FREE AND COMPREHENSIVE:
MIT’S OPENCOURSEWARE

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, launched in 2001, set the standard for open-access online course materials as the first initiative of its kind. In what continues to be the highest-profile project in this field, MIT pledged to offer freely available web-based versions of syllabi, lecture notes, reading lists, assignments, and other materials for virtually all of its courses. OCW thus constituted a major institutional commitment to transparency, providing, in the words of former Provost Robert Brown, “a window into MIT on a very fundamental level”—its classrooms.¹ Though the committee that initiated OCW did not set out to create a free offering, it opted to do so when consultant studies revealed that a fee-based effort, akin to Fathom and AllLearn, was highly unlikely to generate sufficient revenues. Subsequently, the project’s open availability has become a cornerstone of its success. MIT President Charles Vest, OCW’s key champion at the university, capitalized on the idea’s novelty to parlay personal relationships with foundation leaders into an extraordinary amount of start-up funding. MIT OCW has also received ample attention from the Institute’s peers and in the popular press. Though the open courseware field has expanded greatly in the years since OCW’s launch (in part due to MIT’s success in encouraging other institutions to follow its lead), it remains the best-known—and best-funded—initiative of its kind.

Origins and Development of OpenCourseWare

In the late 1990s, conversations regarding the changing face of the university in the digital age—similar to those that prompted the creation of Fathom and AllLearn—were taking place at MIT. When Robert Brown became provost in 1998, he and Charles Vest, the university’s popular and long-serving president, agreed that MIT should think deeply about a possible online project, as the two shared the concern that “we had not found our place” when it came to “what technology-enabled education was going to mean to the Institute.” Brown convened a campus Council on Educational Technology (CET), which he co-chaired along with Professors Hal Abelson, who had long been involved with both open-source software and educational technology projects, and Steven Lerman, director of MIT’s Center for Educational Computing Initiatives since 1991. Brown said that at the time, MIT was keenly aware of e-learning efforts like Fathom, AllLearn, eCornell, and others, and that “there was a sense that other institutions were going to eclipse us” if MIT did not develop a similarly ambitious online project.²

When the committee began to meet, it was widely assumed that its eventual recommendation would be a revenue-generating model like others in the market at the time. Over several years, the CET strategy group engaged the consulting firms of Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) and McKinsey & Company to conduct market research and develop potential models for an MIT online project. Several for-profit ideas were proposed and then discussed at a strategy group meeting in February 2000, with paid online course offerings targeted toward the school’s alumni—very similar to the AllLearn model—rising to the top.³ Yet after surveying alumni and investigating the competitive landscape, the BAH group delivered a final report to the committee in the summer of 2000 concluding that “such a project would place MIT in a non-traditional business where it had little or no existing capabilities,” and that an alumni audience would be insufficient to support a profitable venture.⁴

But interest in disseminating some form of MIT materials online had firmly taken root, and the committee was wary of returning to the provost empty-handed. According to Lerman, we “concluded that it was futile as far as making money, which prompted us to think about other things we could do.”⁵ The essential idea behind OCW—to publish MIT course materials online, but to give them away for free rather than attempting to restrict access and generate revenues—emerged at the very end of the CET’s final report, which was submitted to the provost for review. Implicit in the report’s recommendation that MIT pursue courseware within a “zero revenue model” was the stipulation that such courses would be purely recreational and non-credit-bearing, a decision that committee member Shigeru Miyagawa said stemmed from the group’s desire to “not do anything to dilute the MIT brand.”⁶ The OCW idea was immediately embraced by Brown and then by Vest, who said that upon first hearing the idea he became “an instant convert.”⁷ In an early email to strategy group chairman Dick Yue, Vest wrote that he was “increasingly enthused about your basic recommendation. . . . done properly, it could be a serious act of national/international leadership. It certainly will change the equation.”⁸

In the context of the contemporary online educational landscape, MIT viewed OCW as a break from the emerging commercial model and a bold step in a new direction. This open approach—which emerged only after the profit-seeking model was deemed infeasible—allowed MIT to enhance its online presence by offering unrestricted access to its courseware.⁹ Although interest in making educational materials freely available to the world was not the original driver for MIT’s exploration of this space, the open-access ethos found many supporters at the university. Lerman recalled that “in effect, it was almost a political statement at the time it was announced. There was a lot of movement to commercialize and capitalize upon these resources at the time, and OCW was a counterweight to that.”¹⁰ The initiative’s first grant proposal distilled this aspect of OCW’s self-presentation as an altruistic foil to the profit-driven activity that had infiltrated the education sector, stating that it “aims not to bolster financial capital, but to advance human capital in places within and beyond the Institute’s current reach.”¹¹

With the idea on the table and the enthusiastic commitment of the CET to move forward, the next step was obtaining funding for the project. When the concept was first presented to him, Vest proposed that if MIT were to commit to OCW, the effort should be a comprehensive publication involving the entire faculty and curriculum.¹² Early estimates (which later proved outsized) suggested that an online effort to publish digital versions of each of the university’s courses would cost $100 million, so securing suitable funding was a necessary early step.¹³

Vest personally instigated early funding conversations, traveling to New York in the fall of 2000 for breakfast with William G. Bowen, then-president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a long-time acquaintance. During their first meeting, Bowen expressed interest in the idea and also encouraged Vest to reach out to Paul Brest, president of the Hewlett Foundation, as another potential funder. Bowen had recently delivered the annual Romanes lecture at Oxford on “The University in a Digitized, Commercialized Age,” asserting that universities are unique institutions with singular missions and are at great risk if they behave too much like businesses—tempting as such an approach might become in the new digital environment.¹⁴ MIT OCW may have therefore been precisely the sort of program that would have intrigued Bowen at the time.¹⁵

Following auspicious discussions with funders, members of the subcommittee took the idea to a wider circle of their colleagues within MIT, circulating information on OCW in the final months of 2000 in preparation for meetings with the department heads and a vote by the MIT faculty—which came down in favor of supporting OCW—in February 2001.¹⁶ Although the early talks with the Hewlett and Mellon Foundations were promising, MIT’s grant funding had not yet been awarded when the initiative was announced on April 4, 2001, in a front-page story in the New York Times.¹⁷ In that article, the project was described as a comprehensive publication of all MIT courses and a long-term commitment by the university.¹⁸ Committing to OCW so fully and publicly was a bold move on MIT’s part, but that same audacity, coupled with the altruistic potential of the OCW concept, may have been what intrigued the funders to take risks of their own in supporting it. Brest characterized investment in OCW as a “big bet” for Hewlett, but one that might pay huge dividends in what he called a “very promising area.”¹⁹ Ira Fuchs, the program officer who oversaw OCW’s grant at the Mellon Foundation, confirmed this.²⁰ According to Fuchs, decision makers at Mellon “really bought into the ambitious and unique nature of doing all 1,800 courses. . . . Although we did hear from others who thought that MIT was only proposing to do what they would have done for themselves—for me, the unprecedented, comprehensive nature of the project was worthy of Mellon funding.”²¹

OpenCourseWare’s Content and Organization

Versions of nearly every course taught at MIT have now been published on the OCW site (pictured in Figure 3.1), totaling 2,000 courses and counting. Each course may be represented by a variety of materials, including syllabi, reading lists, lecture notes, and video or audio lecture recordings. By providing these materials, MIT allows the home user to access some of the same content used by MIT students in their coursework. But proponents of OCW have always been very careful to stress, in their own statements and in the site’s explanatory text, that OCW does not constitute MIT’s entrance into the distance education space: there is no credit associated with OCW courses, and OCW is not a path to an MIT degree. Steve Carson, OCW’s external relations director, said that “prior to the whole OpenCourseWare idea, people were trying to fill the need for certification—that’s what distance learning is all about. But I think the recognition of the committee that proposed OpenCourseWare is that there’s a really severe need for just access to content [and] information in the absence of certification.”²²

FIGURE 3.1 MIT OpenCourseWare landing page (as it appeared on May 11, 2010).

Available at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm. © 2002-2010 MIT. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

The OCW team therefore maintains that the project’s mission is to provide some of the pieces of an MIT experience without attempting to replicate that experience at a distance.²³ This distinction is clearly written into OCW’s first grant proposal, which states that “OCW is not a course, but it is courseware; it is not a door to an MIT education, but it is a window on MIT educational content.”²⁴ The attention paid to explaining not only what OpenCourseWare is, but also what it is not, was an important way in which the OCW team assuaged early concerns about the project: namely, that giving away the core knowledge of MIT to just anybody might undercut the university’s primary operating model—or worse, might nullify the prestige value of the school’s degrees. The Times article announcing OCW posits that MIT students might resent having to pay tuition when their courses are being offered online for free, but it quotes Vest as saying that “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.”²⁵

MIT OCW’s offerings span the Institute’s entire curriculum, and this comprehensiveness is perhaps the initiative’s most striking feature. The OCW team cites several motivations for the decision to publish MIT’s full course catalogue, as opposed to selecting particular courses. The site is organized by academic department, with all MIT departments represented. OCW’s first director, Anne Margulies, said that by not restricting the program to only the “star courses,” some of the university’s “hidden jewels”—lesser-known but nonetheless excellent professors or courses—have had the same chance to find an audience as the more famous MIT courses.²⁶ Vest said that the MIT faculty like to think of the institution as “all at one level,” without strengths and weaknesses among departments and faculty members.²⁷ Steven Lerman, then-chair of the MIT faculty, agreed that OCW’s decision to procure materials from all of the courses helped to maintain good relations between the initiative and the faculty—a key consideration, as faculty participation was voluntary. “Politically, it made sense,” he explained, “because you don’t have to choose your favorite children . . . if you get the entire faculty to buy in.”²⁸

While the vast majority of courses taught at MIT are represented on OCW, the amount of content present for each course is not uniform; the depth varies widely from course to course, from the robust—complete archive of video lectures, extensive notes, homework and test questions—to the relatively sparse, as depicted in Figure 3.2—a syllabus, a reading list, and little else. Brown said that in formulating the OCW concept, the consensus was that “the power came from striving to do all, with the total understanding that different content lent itself at different levels to doing this effectively, and some of it would be pretty thin.”²⁹

Such unevenness may be a necessary consequence of the initiative’s comprehensive nature. Miyagawa said that MIT recognized the trade-off: “when you have as many courses as we do, it’s unavoidable that there will be such inconsistency. As long as there are enough courses that are deep enough to be useful, if there are some that are sort of stark, that’s part of the deal.”³⁰ In 2003, several years into the project, OCW instituted some minimum standards for all OCW courses in an effort to avoid publishing what Margulies called “Swiss cheese,” or “courses full of big holes that wouldn’t be valuable to anybody.”³¹ Every OCW course should now have at least three elements—planning materials, subject-matter content, and learning activities—though the definition of what fits these categories may vary.³² In recent years, MIT has become increasingly focused on incorporating more video content into the OCW site (see, for example, Figure 3.3), though only about 60 courses, or 3 percent of the total corpus, contained video elements at the time of writing.³³

FIGURE 3.2 MIT OpenCourseWare course page, “Anthropological Theory” with Professor Susan S. Silbey (as taught in spring 2003). The basic elements of a typical, text-based OCW course are visible in the navigation tabs on the left: the course includes a syllabus, calendar, reading list, and brief guide to reading social science texts.

Available at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Anthropology/21A-110Anthropological-TheorySpring2003/CourseHome/index.htm. © 2002–2010 MIT. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

FIGURE 3.3 Still from MIT OpenCourseWare lecture video, Physics 8.02, lecture 1 with Professor Walter Lewin (as taught in spring 2003).

Available at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02Electricity-and-MagnetismSpring2002/VideoAndCaptions/detail/embed01.htm. Permission provided courtesy of MIT. © 2002–2010 MIT. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

To create such a large repository of content, the fledgling OCW organization needed both an orderly operation and buy-in from the faculty. In OCW’s earliest days, while its grant funding was pending, the project was run by an interim management board headed by Lerman. That board determined that a large team with a professional manager would be necessary for OCW to make the ambitious launch goals set by its founders: to mount 500 MIT courses in the project’s first two years. Based on the interim board’s recommendation, the OCW organization was given structural autonomy within MIT as a distinct office reporting to the provost.³⁴

The search for a suitable executive director commenced when the grant funding became available; it resulted in the hiring of Anne Margulies, a former CIO of Harvard. Margulies joined the MIT staff as the first full-time OCW employee in May 2002 and was charged with delivering a 50-course pilot by September of that year.³⁵ Margulies recalls that in those first months the operation was run “like a start-up,” with a combination of consultants and independent contractors helping to assemble the courses while Margulies contemplated the permanent staff positions that OCW would need. OCW courses were produced in phases, with the first 500 completed in October 2003 at the time of the site’s official launch and 1,550 by 2006; the goal of publishing 1,800 courses, constituting virtually all of MIT’s curriculum, was achieved in 2007.³⁶ The staff has fluctuated accordingly, reaching about 50 people at the height of the “ramp-up” phase when OCW expanded from 50 courses to 500 within a year.³⁷ The project currently has 22 full-time employees and 3 consultants, including an executive director (Margulies was succeeded by Cecelia d’Oliveira, formerly OCW’s technology director, in 2007), an external relations director, a publication director, an intellectual property supervisor, a production manager, and a handful of department liaisons.

From the outset, OCW was intended to be a comprehensive endeavor, yet faculty participation was to remain voluntary. When the project was announced in April 2001 as a commitment by MIT to “post sites for all its courses,” total faculty cooperation was by no means guaranteed.³⁸ But the core group of faculty responsible for the idea had already begun an extensive internal communications campaign on OCW’s behalf. During the winter of 2000, with funding for the initiative pending, some subcommittee members distributed informational memos and discussed the project with representatives from each of MIT’s academic departments.³⁹ As it turned out, faculty willingness to participate was less of an obstacle to OCW’s success than had originally been anticipated.⁴⁰ These early meetings were successful, and the MIT faculty voted to support moving forward with the initiative in February 2001.

The project began publishing the courses of the most willing professors and progressed from there.⁴¹ Many participants in the 50-course proof-of-concept in OCW’s first year were members of the planning committee or their close colleagues. Some 500 courses were mounted in the second phase, the OCW pilot, and Margulies explained that at that point an effort was made to represent the breadth of the MIT curriculum by publishing courses from every department, including large lecture courses and small seminars.⁴² Early faculty participants received stipends of $3,000 per course for contributing, though stipends were reduced to $2,000 by 2005 and ceased after 2006.⁴³ Margulies said that stipends were seen as “a way to encourage early adopters . . . to build early momentum” around contributing materials, and that the intention was always to phase them out over time as the production process became more efficient and faculty participation more common.⁴⁴

The OCW team’s guiding principle for securing faculty participation has been to make the production process as easy on them as possible, ensuring that the required time commitment was minimal and that faculty would have support from a professional staff. Once professors make the raw materials that they are already using in their courses available to the OCW team, the staff handles the remaining steps of the process: digitizing the materials, creating additional materials when necessary, addressing intellectual property concerns (for a more detailed discussion of this and other projects’ handling of such issues, see Chapter 8), and posting the content to the site.

Faculty participation was also strongly encouraged by senior academic leadership, up to and including the university president. Vest said that the university’s administration was “heavily involved” in OCW and felt “the obligation to build much of the support for it” within the Institute.⁴⁵ Clearly an institutional priority, OCW reports in at the provost’s level, a decision which Margulies felt was a key element of its organizational efficacy.⁴⁶ As president and provost at the time of OCW’s founding, Vest and Brown exercised direct, personal leadership when it came to OCW, actively championing it both within and outside the university.⁴⁷ When it came to securing funding for the project, Vest took it upon himself to initiate contact with foundations, and Brown was the principal investigator on the original grant proposal. Miyagawa called Vest’s role in the OCW project a rare display of “academic leadership exerted in a direct and useful fashion,” and Margulies considers the involvement of MIT’s administration to be the linchpin of OCW’s success: “I don’t think this ever would have happened at any place but MIT, or under any leadership but Chuck’s. . . . Faculty come up with great ideas every day, but the leadership Chuck showed to seize this idea was really extraordinary.”⁴⁸

Though Vest and Brown have both left MIT, OCW continues to receive attention from administrators at the highest level. According to Lerman, “one of the virtues of Chuck Vest’s unequivocal commitment was that it was passed on to future presidents and provosts,” a legacy bolstered by the fact that Vest dedicated not only his presidency but the institution as a whole to establishing OCW as “a permanent feature of the MIT academic program.”⁴⁹ Despite the turnover in these key posts, OCW continues to play a major role in the external conversations that the current president, Susan Hockfield, has about MIT. Current provost Rafael Reif summed up the administration’s commitment to the initiative this way: “OCW is so much a part of MIT—we’re all extremely proud of OCW.”⁵⁰

Impact of OpenCourseWare

In a 2004 article he authored in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Vest defined the audience for OCW materials as incredibly heterogeneous: “a faculty member at a new engineering university in Ghana, a precocious high-school biology student in suburban Chicago, a political scientist in Poland, a literature professor in up-state New York, or an executive in a management seminar down the hall at MIT will be able to use the materials our professors rely on in teaching our full-time students.”⁵¹ But Margulies and Vest both said that the audience originally envisioned for OCW was primarily other educators, and that the OCW team was surprised to eventually learn that more “self-learners” were using the materials than teachers.⁵²

There has always been an emphasis on the developing world as a key audience for OCW. The first grant proposal states that “we expect OCW to be of particular value in developing countries that are trying to expand their higher education systems rapidly. . . . The OCW materials will be able to jump-start curriculum improvements in these countries.”⁵³ Lerman echoed this sentiment in the press conference announcing OCW, saying “we hope our materials will be translated. Developing countries need information, and they need to develop infrastructure and institutions.”⁵⁴

The main appeal of OCW rests on the premise that these course materials will be useful to individuals around the world. But the OCW staff admits that much of the site may not be suitable for the average learner. According to Margulies, “the material starts with the assumption that you have to be an MIT-caliber student to be able to use [it]; it’s not at all for your average student.”⁵⁵ When asked if the site’s current offerings are geared toward any specific group, Carson responded that “in going for breadth, I think we probably skewed to the side of educators by covering the entire curriculum. The bare bones version of a course is only going to be useful to educators and educational administrators who are developing curricula. . . . But you need a relatively deep amount of content in a course for independent learners to make use of it,” and many of the OCW versions lack that necessary depth.⁵⁶

From the beginning, OCW did not plan to offer users any kind of interaction with MIT professors or graduate students, avoiding the asynchronous threaded discussion or live chats that characterized Fathom and AllLearn courses.⁵⁷ On the one hand, this limited the scope of the project in a way that allowed the OCW team to stay focused on its publishing mission and minimize distractions—and in a university full of people with personal and professional interests in technology, OCW has not allowed itself to become bogged down in unnecessary technological complexities.⁵⁸ But on the other hand, the lack of interactive features on OCW has also necessarily limited its impact: as Vest himself said in his first press conference on OCW, “real education requires interaction, the interaction that is part of American teaching.”⁵⁹

From the beginning, MIT has felt an obligation to undertake self-evaluation efforts to track its user demographics along with levels and patterns of usage. But understanding usage scenarios for freely available online content has often proved quite challenging. Margulies said that “when we got grant funding, we knew we were going to have to have measurable results to report,” but “figuring out how to measure and evaluate results was hugely difficult.”⁶⁰ OCW first approached outsiders to investigate usage by issuing a request for user studies proposals, but after a series of unsuccessful partnerships, concluded that they would be better off conducting the research themselves.⁶¹ To date, that research has centered mostly on gathering demographic information through surveys and web analytics, as well as employing survey methodologies to understand the uses to which the OCW content is put.

The original grant proposal states that concerning “the usage levels of OCW, we have not yet established clear, quantitative goals,” and the organization never developed a specific number of users they wanted to reach with the material.⁶² An evaluation conducted in 2009 revealed that users were geographically dispersed, with 54 percent of visits originating from outside the United States. The report also broke down users by type, with 43 percent identifying themselves as self-learners, 42 percent as students, and 9 percent as educators.⁶³ As of July 2010, the OCW website claimed the site has received “100 million visits by 71 million visitors from virtually every country” since its launch, averaging 1 million visits per month.⁶⁴

When it comes to the effect that OCW has had outside of the MIT community, OCW’s proponents are confident that their work has been meaningful worldwide, though the specifics or the scale of that impact is difficult to determine. While internal benefits to MIT may have been an acknowledged consequence of the OCW project from the beginning, the external impact was always viewed as paramount. Vest wrote in 2004 that “the real pay-off of what we hope will become the opencourseware movement will be its effect on educators and learners around the world.”⁶⁵ The language of the original grant proposal’s sections dealing with impact reveals both MIT’s vast ambitions for OCW’s effects on the wider world and a lack of clear metrics for systematically assessing that impact. The proposal’s authors state that “we believe that in the long run, OCW, like other successful contributions to education, will lead to greater equality and improvements in economic performance, but these long-term, ultimate outcomes are impossible to isolate and measure.”⁶⁶

Though web analytics can give the OCW team a sense of the traffic levels their site is receiving, whether or not OCW has actually made a difference in teaching, learning, or the state of global education is a more complicated issue. Margulies said that OCW has always known that it was important to collect data on impact—not only on who was using the materials and how, but also on whether the site was actually creating meaningful change in individual lives or institutions—but that the team knew that it would take time to develop a methodology for that sort of inquiry. “Because our audience is the world, it’s not like we could measure test scores or worldwide educational achievement, or even the achievement of our users. With OpenCourseWare, we couldn’t have a control group, so our impact data is still somewhat anecdotal.”⁶⁷

When assessing its global impact to date, OCW has relied heavily on the voluminous—yet unscientific—feedback it has received.⁶⁸ The tens of thousands of overwhelmingly positive emails that users have sent to OCW since its launch have convinced MIT that it has created something of true value. “I think it’s had—in some cases—a genuinely transformative and profound impact on lots and lots of individuals who have used it either to dramatically improve their teaching or to advance their learning,” Margulies said. “The accumulated over-the-top feedback that we get convinces me that it’s been enormously positive.”⁶⁹ User surveys have tried to generate some data on impact, and a detailed Program Evaluation Findings Report conducted in 2005 found that “80 percent of visitors rate OCW’s impact as extremely positive or positive; 91 percent expect that level of future impact.” The report also states that “visitor intent to return to the site is a strong indicator of perceived impact . . . 76 percent of first time visitors and 88 percent of returning visitors indicate that they will definitely return to the site.”⁷⁰ But the method of surveying visitors to the website who have volunteered to complete questionnaires necessarily limits respondents to a self-selected portion of the user population and excludes nonusers altogether.⁷¹ While OCW has received positive feedback on all of the indicators of impact it has established, it has nothing to benchmark this level of usage and these reactions against—no way to evaluate if positive feelings translate into an impact commensurate with MIT’s hopes for the program.

Immediately following the program’s launch, community expectations for OCW’s impact were sky-high. In his 2001 President’s Report, Vest said that “the reaction to its announcement has been astounding. Some have likened it to the Gutenberg printing press and to the Great Library at Alexandria. This is a bit hyperbolic for my taste, but even as clear-eyed an observer as IBM’s CEO, Lou Gerstner, recently stated to Wall Street analysts: ‘What do you think happened when MIT put its entire course catalog on the Net, for free? If that didn’t send a shiver through the higher education system in the world, I don’t know what will.’”⁷² But several years into the project, interpretations vary as to whether these early ambitions for OCW have yet been realized. A 2007 report to the Hewlett Foundation reviewing its investments in Open Educational Resources calls OCW a “world-changing project.”⁷³ But Ira Fuchs of the Mellon Foundation takes a more tempered view. Although he credits the OCW concept with great potential for future transformative impact, in assessing the project’s system-wide impact to date he said that “if you take away OCW completely, I’m not sure that higher education would be noticeably different.”⁷⁴ A decade after OCW’s launch, it is too early to determine whether the idea will fundamentally alter the way that universities disseminate knowledge—and if so, how.

More concretely, MIT OCW has served as a model for course dissemination efforts at other institutions, spurring the creation of over 200 similar projects at universities around the world (though it is important to note that some similar open projects, such as Rice University’s Connexions or webcast.berkeley, profiled in Chapter 6, had quietly begun prior to OCW). From very early in OCW’s history, its proponents have sought not only to publish MIT’s catalogue of course materials but also to encourage other institutions to do the same. At the press conference announcing OCW, Vest said that “this is about something bigger than MIT. . . . 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.”⁷⁵ As suggested, success for the initiative in the eyes of its founders hinged on both creating the OCW product and serving as a model for others to emulate.⁷⁶

The OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC), launched in 2005 with a planning grant from the Hewlett Foundation, represents OCW’s efforts to turn an idea into a movement. OCW began fielding requests from other universities—with early interlocutors including the Johns Hopkins University, Tufts University, and Utah State University—to tell its story and describe its processes. In OCW’s early years, this outreach function was managed at a personal level by the project’s leadership, but Carson explained that by 2005 the conversations involved so many outside participants that they were becoming unwieldy.⁷⁷ According to Margulies, “as we started to help people do what we were doing, a natural next step was to formalize it and organize ourselves.”⁷⁸ Following an initial planning meeting in February 2005, the Consortium had its first official meeting that September and established three objectives for itself: to “extend the reach and impact of OpenCourseWare by encouraging the adoption and adaptation of open educational materials around the world,” “foster the development of additional OpenCourseWare projects,” and “ensure the long-term sustainability of OpenCourseWare projects by identifying ways to improve effectiveness and reduce costs.”⁷⁹

Until recently, the Consortium was basically run as a subsidiary of MIT. The OCWC’s first director, John Dehlin, was hired in 2006 as an MIT employee reporting to Carson, and grant funding from Hewlett was awarded to MIT on the Consortium’s behalf, giving MIT final authority over how it was to be spent.⁸⁰ In July 2008, the Consortium was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) organization independent of MIT (a structure that allows it to manage its own finances), and its leadership has shifted to a governing board composed of representatives from various member institutions, with Carson serving as its chair.

The Consortium currently includes several hundred institutions of higher education, with its most robust growth coming from non-English-speaking regions, particularly Asia. But elite U.S. institutions have not been particularly receptive to the OCW concept. Margulies said that when she and Provost Brown first discussed OCW’s potential to inspire similar projects, they had assumed that public institutions in the United States would be early adopters. “Instead, we found that people got more excited about OpenCourseWare the farther you got from Cambridge—it was people from the other side of the world who really embraced the concept.”⁸¹ Carson agreed, suggesting that MIT’s involvement with the Consortium has been “both a blessing and a curse”: he believes that the MIT name has been a draw for some, while others have resisted joining for fear of appearing to be following MIT.⁸² Time will tell in which direction the Consortium ultimately develops, but to date OCW’s original vision of fellow American universities joining in droves has not been fulfilled.

The OCW project has been carried out in a coordinated and centrally planned manner, and now that OCW has become an established entity, the initiative may be evolving into a more prominent strategic element for MIT as an institution. Assessing OCW’s internal value to the Institute, Carson said, “I think it started out as a strategic approach toward positioning MIT in the online world, but it’s proved to be a tool that’s useful in a great many other ways.”⁸³

Indeed, some of the “other ways” in which OCW could benefit the MIT community were present in its founders’ minds early on, and they have taken on greater importance in recent years. Margulies said that the OCW team may have initially “underestimated” the benefits that the project would have for MIT, although “it’s not as if they didn’t have an inkling . . . that it would have a subtle and secondary beneficial impact on improving the educational materials at MIT, and therefore MIT students would benefit.”⁸⁴ Brown and Abelson confirmed that the potential internal impacts of OCW were an important early component of the project and were especially valuable in convincing faculty to participate. Brown said that “when we went to sell it internally, it wasn’t about doing something philanthropic or noble for the world, as much as transforming educational content internally.”⁸⁵ Abelson agreed that planners felt they had to demonstrate to faculty that their own students would benefit from their participation in OCW. When first discussing the OCW concept with faculty, “the thing we had to fight was the notion that we were doing this for altruistic reasons. . . . We had to explain how [OCW] would give MIT a view of itself,” Abelson said.⁸⁶

Many contend that OCW has positively affected teaching and learning at MIT. As Brown put it, the presence of a course’s written materials on OCW “pushes the faculty in the direction of ‘How do I best use the contact hours so that people learn?’ which is clearly critical.”⁸⁷ The 2005 survey showed that many professors felt that contributing to OCW improves their teaching: of the MIT faculty surveyed, 32 percent agreed that contributing to OCW “improves their teaching materials.”⁸⁸ Margulies suggested that the reason for this could be that faculty pay more attention to the quality of their course content when they know those materials will be shared with a world audience.⁸⁹ OCW has also permitted faculty to look closely at colleagues’ teaching materials and to identify gaps between concepts covered in lower- and upper-level courses, evaluating the curriculum as a whole perhaps for the first time. Lerman said that a comprehensive publication like OCW has been somewhat of a uniting force for the MIT faculty: “OCW is one of the few things that all the faculty do together. I couldn’t get 5 or 10 percent of them to come to a faculty meeting, yet 90 percent of them have licensed their materials to OCW.”⁹⁰

OCW also receives significant use on MIT’s campus and has generated positive feedback from students.⁹¹ The 2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report states that “in all semesters for which the OCW site was available, the heaviest use from the MIT domain coincides with registration week,” suggesting that MIT students are using it as an “enhanced course catalogue” when selecting their classes. “Additional traffic spikes occur during mid-term and finals weeks, suggesting use of the site by students in preparation for examinations.”⁹² OCW also benefits the Institute by preserving teaching materials.⁹³

In response to OCW, MIT has received a great deal of positive—even glowing—attention from the press, due in no small part to the novelty of the open courseware concept when the project launched.⁹⁴ Some of OCW’s press coverage emphasized the Institute’s first-mover advantage. For instance, a 2003 article in Wired magazine definitively states that prior to MIT’s launch of OCW, “no institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary, or as daunting,” and that with OCW, “MIT earned the distinction as the only university forward-thinking enough to open-source itself.”⁹⁵ The volume and quality of press attention that MIT’s initiative has received may also owe something to the OCW team’s media savvy. While OCW does not devote funds specifically to marketing activities, it has been shrewd in its dealings with the media and employs two full-time external relations professionals. MIT leaked the OCW story to the Times before the funding had been officially secured—a bold move, and one that guaranteed that the Mellon and Hewlett Foundations’ eventual role in supporting the project would not detract from MIT’s primacy in that front-page coverage.⁹⁶

OCW has yielded reputational benefits for MIT in the eyes of the world at large and the school’s own alumni. As one article noted, “in some academic circles, MIT was viewed as making a masterful PR move. If so, the scheme worked brilliantly, because most of the world applauded.”⁹⁷ This international appeal of OCW—and, by extension, MIT—was affirmed by MIT’s provost and president. According to Reif, OCW is “a way to stay connected with the globe,” and Hockfield said that “when we talk about global reach, OCW is a big part of our global reach.”⁹⁸ Vest also offered that OCW has been useful for strengthening ties between MIT and its alumni. He reported in 2004 that in his travels discussing the initiative, alumni have told him that, “because of OCW, they have never been prouder of the Institute.”⁹⁹

Some members of the MIT community are also confident that OCW has played at least some minimal role in incoming first-year students’ choice to attend the university. At the first OCW press conference, Vest asked rhetorically: “Am I worried that the OpenCourseWare project will hurt MIT’s enrollment? No. In fact, I am absolutely confident that providing this worldwide window onto an MIT education, showing what we teach, may be a very good thing for attracting prospective students.”¹⁰⁰ The 2005 report corroborates that hypothesis, stating that surveys of current students, faculty, and a sample of alumni showed that “71% of students, 59% of faculty members and 42% of alumni use the site, [and] 35% of freshmen aware of OCW before deciding to attend MIT were influenced by it.”¹⁰¹ But in Provost Reif’s opinion, a program like OCW has limited powers in areas like attracting students: “I don’t think a student comes to MIT for OCW, so I don’t think it has attracted students to come who wouldn’t have come already. I do think it’s increased our prestige around the world—but I don’t know that it’s had an impact on measurable things like attracting talent to come.”¹⁰²

OpenCourseWare and Sustainability

A large and complex endeavor with a production process reliant on many individuals, OCW has required an ample budget over the years, most of which has been provided by outside funding. The Hewlett and Mellon Foundations “initially committed $11 million for the pilot phase of OpenCourseWare and have since awarded an additional $15 million.”¹⁰³ When the grants were initially made, they were outliers within both the Mellon and Hewlett Foundations’ typical portfolios. Mellon gave two large grants and then curtailed its financial involvement with online courseware, but the Hewlett Foundation completely retooled its program areas following the OCW award, which program officer Catherine Casserly called the “anchor grant” of the Foundation’s new Open Educational Resources division.¹⁰⁴ As of July 2009, the OCW program has cost $33,707,000, of which $6,523,000 has been provided by MIT, not including the university’s substantial in-kind contributions to the OCW project (e.g., office space in MIT buildings, portions of administrators’ time).¹⁰⁵ The OCW staff projects that the cost of operating the project in future years will be $4 million annually.¹⁰⁶

In the early days of OCW, plans for the initiative’s long-term sustainability were not of primary importance.¹⁰⁷ Bowen said that he and members of the Mellon Foundation’s board had been unsure all along about OCW’s sustainability, and that “Chuck [Vest] didn’t know himself, he just sort of hoped that somehow all would work out.” While the board did grant OCW’s proposal, Bowen said that concerns about the project’s long-term financial viability were always present, and “I don’t know that there’s been an answer [to the question of sustainability] to this day.”¹⁰⁸ Lerman confirmed this, saying, “we have had more meetings than I can count to discuss sustainability—it is the single real unsolved problem of OCW.”¹⁰⁹ In recent years, the impending expiration of the project’s grant funding has heightened the sense of urgency associated with the problem.

Reliant as OCW was on foundation funding, it was always clear to members of the team that such awards would be temporary, and funding sources would eventually have to shift. An inquiry into OCW’s financial future was conducted by the OCW Faculty Advisory Committee in 2005, resulting in a recommendation for a financial arrangement in which MIT’s General Institute Budget would support a portion of OCW’s operating costs, with additional funds raised by the OCW team. According to that recommendation, “the case for sustained financial support of OCW publishing rests on the internal educational benefits that the program provides to the Institute’s overall educational mission.”¹¹⁰ As OCW looks to its parent institution to cover more of its operating costs moving forward, attention is turning increasingly toward enhancing the benefits that OCW offers the Institute. According to d’Oliveira, a project without direct local benefit might be too easily considered expendable during times of financial crisis, so “now there’s a big new focus on ‘how do we increase the benefits to MIT?’”¹¹¹ For now at least, the case seems to have been made to the administration that OCW is an important part of the educational experience at MIT. Provost Reif said that “clearly it’s being used, not just by people in Africa, but by people right here at MIT. MIT students benefit from it, and that to me is very important—we need to worry about our kids first.”¹¹²

All involved agree that perpetually updating OCW’s offerings must be part of its sustainability plan, requiring that funds be devoted not only to adding new courses but also to refreshing existing materials. The first proposal mentions the need to continue to update courses in the Steady State phase (the period following the completion of the 1,800th course), aiming for “a complete renewal of each course’s Web site, on average, every four years.”¹¹³ Hockfield believes it is absolutely necessary to continue updating OCW, as she does not want to become complacent and allow the site’s quality to deteriorate. “One of the wonders of the internet world is that everything evolves so fast, so for OCW to continue to be relevant and continue to be attractive, it needs to innovate and keep up,” she said. “What is core to MIT’s education is that it moves with the field—[OCW] is on its way to the junk heap of history if we don’t update it every year” to ensure that it remains accurate enough that MIT can be proud of it.¹¹⁴ The OCW team also hopes to be able to keep the technology current as new options become available, as well as to eventually create additional functionality for the site.

Over the years, OCW has engaged in a series of preliminary efforts to add new features to the site while still pursuing the primary goal of creating a nearly complete online publication of MIT courses. OCW partnered with an outside organization to add message boards to the courses, though the chats were later abandoned due to lack of interest. More successfully, OCW has added a “Highlights for High School” portal to direct students and teachers to the material on the site most suitable for secondary school coursework or preparation for Advanced Placement examinations. Other innovations have included a program to distribute OCW on hard drives to areas of the globe with connectivity problems, adding audio and video content to the site, and contracting with secondary distribution channels like iTunes U and YouTube.

Fiscal year 2009 was the first in which OCW had to operate without funding from the Hewlett Foundation. The project’s current operating costs—to maintain the site, add new courses, and update and augment existing courses—are $4 million per year; half of this is provided by funds designated in MIT’s budget, while the other half must be raised.¹¹⁵ A major gift of $6 million from Ab Initio, a software company founded by an MIT alumna, has ensured that operating costs are covered for three additional years, but the Institute has not settled on a concrete plan for generating revenue beyond that.¹¹⁶ The OCW team agrees that a number of avenues for funding OCW should be explored simultaneously. Perhaps chief among them is pursuing donations, a strategy that has already met with some success. In addition to the large Ab Initio gift, Carson said that in 2007 OCW generated almost $100,000 in online donations. In the fall of 2009 OCW launched a naming opportunities program so that individual donors could sponsor particular courses.¹¹⁷ Other ideas for future sustainability efforts include soliciting and accepting corporate sponsorship for OCW, with an eye toward building an endowment.¹¹⁸ Vest remarked that, going in, “we did not have a clear model, but we were pretty confident that if it was successful, we would find a way to keep it going.”¹¹⁹ Moving forward, it remains to be seen how successful OCW can be in generating the funds it requires, and how the current necessity of focusing on fundraising may affect its core publishing effort.

Perhaps OCW’s most significant contribution has been symbolic, in that it offers a new way of thinking about university content online, both within and outside the academy. At MIT, OCW has become the cornerstone of an ideological commitment to openness rooted in the university’s core mission. Vest wrote in 2004 that “our challenge is simple: Can the decision makers of the world’s leading educational institutions use what we are doing on our campuses to improve the lives of people around the world? History has proved that education and discovery are best advanced when knowledge is shared openly.”¹²⁰ This sentiment is supported by MIT’s more recent institution-wide open-access mandate to begin making all products of the faculty’s research openly available.¹²¹ Externally, OCW has proved an influential exemplar. As John Dehlin, former head of the OCW Consortium, has said, “It’s still not intuitive to share the learning. I think MIT’s largest contribution is . . . putting this very simple idea of sharing the learning on the map in the public consciousness.”¹²²

Looking back on OCW’s accomplishments to date, it is clear that the project’s achievements in the realm of “intellectual philanthropy” have coincided with promotion of the university’s brand: the project’s successes are MIT’s successes. Reflecting on OCW’s founding with the benefit of hindsight, Vest concluded that “depending on your vantage point you could say MIT was arrogant, or you could say it was very generous, or that it was very far-sighted—probably some combination.”¹²³

 

¹ Interview with Robert Brown, 10/27/08.

² Ibid.

³ Vest confirmed that when the committee began to discuss online ventures, “the clear bias of people going in was that we ought to do something that [was] going to return revenue to the institution” (interview with Charles Vest, 9/30/08).

⁴ Abelson, Hal, “The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT,” Journal of Science Education and Technology 17, no. 2 (April 2008), 167. Vest said that BAH summarized its voluminous findings in a single PowerPoint slide, which essentially said that for a traditional university to engage in distance education would be “very complicated; it’s going to be highly competitive, and it’s very unlikely to make money” (interview with Charles Vest, 9/30/08).

⁵ Interview with Steven Lerman, 10/31/08. According to Kirp, there was a direct connection between OCW and Fathom: “OpenCourseWare (OCW) emerged as a direct response to the temptations of the market. Late in 1999, as Columbia was readying the launch of Fathom, Ann Kirschner sought out prestigious academic partners. MIT was a top choice because of its stellar reputation in science and engineering, but when she approached the institute, she was rebuffed. MIT officials were skeptical about the market potential of digital education” (Kirp, David L., Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003, 179). MIT’s rejection of Fathom was thus meaningful foreshadowing.

⁶ Interview with Shigeru Miyagawa, 10/29/08. OCW’s first director, Anne Margulies, noted that MIT does not even grant honorary degrees at graduation, so to her it seemed natural that the university would be disinclined to offer any form of credit to outsiders (interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08). Lerman said that when the idea was first presented to faculty, “the language of publishing was widely used” to describe OCW, and “when you publish a textbook and someone reads it, they don’t expect to get credit” (interview with Steven Lerman, 8/3/09).

⁷ Interview with Charles Vest, 9/30/08.

⁸ Charles Vest email to Dick Yue and other members of the committee, October 28, 2000.

⁹ As Curtis J. Bonk summarizes in The World Is Open,“the business plans of other universities attempting to enter the for-profit side of e-learning did not make sense. The economics simply did not add up. And MIT did not care to make an investment in an area where it could not be a leader” (Bonk, Curtis J., The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009, 165).

¹⁰ Interview with Steven Lerman, 10/31/08.

¹¹ “MIT OpenCourseWare: A Proposal Submitted to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,” April 27, 2001, principal investigators Harold Abelson, Robert A. Brown, and Steven R. Lerman, 1.

¹² Interview with Steve Carson, 7/30/09. Lerman said that Brown was also very enthusiastic about making OCW a comprehensive project (interview with Steven Lerman, 8/3/09).

¹³ That figure appears in Goldberg, Carey, “Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free,” New York Times, online edition, April 4, 2001.

¹⁴ Bowen, William G., “At a Slight Angle to the Universe: The University in a Digitized, Commercialized Age,” http://www.mellon.org/news_publications/publications/romanes.pdf/view.

¹⁵ Fathom CEO Ann Kirschner said that she also approached the Mellon Foundation about funding around this time, but Bowen “was concerned about the for-profit structure,” and no funding from Mellon materialized (interview with Ann Kirschner, 7/28/08).

¹⁶ Abelson, “The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT,” 169.

¹⁷ The Hewlett Foundation awarded an initial $5.5 million to MIT on April 30, 2001, and by June the Mellon Foundation had contributed in kind, giving OCW a total of $11 million in start-up capital.

¹⁸ Goldberg, “Auditing Classes at M.I.T.” The article states that OCW is “a 10-year initiative,” and the original grant proposal states that “MIT is committed to the creation of OCW as a sustained Web site representing the content of subjects taught at MIT” (“MIT OpenCourseWare: A Proposal,” 14).

¹⁹ Interview with Paul Brest, 8/20/08.

²⁰ At the time of writing, Fuchs, along with Charles M. Vest, William G. Bowen, and Paul Brest, served on the board of directors of ITHAKA, the not-for-profit parent organization of Ithaka S+R, whose staff initiated and executed the research that resulted in this book.

²¹ Interview with Ira Fuchs, 12/2/08. Those in charge of the Open Educational Resources program at the Hewlett Foundation reported receiving similar feedback: “We have heard faculty from other institutions say that they have looked at the MIT-OCW site and wondered ‘What’s the big deal?’ They argue that they themselves put course materials online for anyone to view. The ‘big deal’ is that never before has one institution or a number of them placed core instructional materials from a substantial number of courses online, in one place, in a coherent and searchable format, to be used worldwide” (Smith, Marshall S., and Catherine M. Casserly, “The Promise of Open Educational Resources,” Change 38, no. 5 [September–October 2006], 12).

²² Interview with Steve Carson, 10/27/08.

²³ Carson described OCW with a metaphor: “We’re not trying to recreate the classroom environment: you don’t get the experience of interacting with the faculty member or of interacting with the students—it’s the footprints of the beast, but not really the animal itself” (interview with Steve Carson, 10/27/08).

²⁴ “MIT OpenCourseWare: A Proposal,” 1.

²⁵ Goldberg, “Auditing Classes at M.I.T.”

²⁶ Interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08. Margulies also believes that publishing the entirety of the university’s curriculum allows the site’s users to see how individual courses fit together to create programs of study.

²⁷ Interview with Charles Vest, 9/30/08.

²⁸ Interview with Steven Lerman, 10/31/08.

²⁹ Interview with Robert Brown, 10/27/08.

³⁰ Interview with Shigeru Miyagawa, 10/29/08.

³¹ Interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08.

³² Interview with Steve Carson, 10/27/08. Planning materials could include the course syllabus or calendar; subject-matter content could be lecture notes, a reading list, or readings; an example of learning activities would be homework problems.

³³ OCW production manager Kate James said that video lectures for six full courses are published each year (interview with Kate James, 10/28/08). According to Steve Carson, as of December 2009, 33 courses have full video lectures, with every course meeting recorded, and about 30 more contain some video elements (interview with Steve Carson, 12/9/09).

³⁴ Margulies and Brown said that in the beginning, some had thought that OCW might logically be housed in the educational technology department, but that a strategic decision was made to have it report to the provost (interviews with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08, and Robert Brown, 10/27/08). Cecilia d’Oliveira, OCW’s second director, feels this is the best and most logical choice: to her OCW has always been a content-focused publishing project rather than a technology project (interview with Cecelia d’Oliveira, 10/29/08).

³⁵ Abelson, “The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT,” 171.

³⁶ MIT OpenCourseWare, “About OCW: Our History,” http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/about/history/index.htm. The number of courses continued to grow to include those newly added to the MIT catalogue, as well as updated versions of existing courses.

³⁷ Interview with Steve Carson, 12/9/09. This figure does not include an outsource team of seven or eight individuals in India doing data entry and supporting OCW’s course management system.

³⁸ Goldberg, “Auditing Classes at M.I.T.”

³⁹ Abelson, “The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT,” 169.

⁴⁰ According to Vest, it was assumed that lack of willingness to share materials openly would be the greatest source of faculty resistance, but in fact no significant numbers of faculty expressed concern with that aspect of the project (interview with Charles Vest, 9/30/08).

⁴¹ Margulies said that to reach that initial goal of 50 courses, “we took whoever would be willing to publish, and we had to talk them into it” (interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08).

⁴² Margulies said that when OCW had published around 1,200 courses, it reached a tipping point at which professors began to reach out to them about participating (interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08).

⁴³ Lerman, Steven R., “Recommendation of the OCW Faculty Advisory Committee on Sustaining OCW into the Future,” September 12, 2005, 2.

⁴⁴ Interview with Anne Margulies, 8/17/09. Of the stipend, Margulies said, “I think it was pretty important in the early stages, [because] when the project started we had to aggressively recruit and win over . . . one faculty member at a time.” The funding was intended to “help the faculty cover the investments they were making in graduate students that were helping them work on their materials” to ready them for inclusion in OCW.

⁴⁵ Interview with Charles Vest, 9/30/08.

⁴⁶ Lerman remembered that when Vest announced OCW as a permanent activity of MIT, “he sent a clear message institutionally that this was a presidential priority” (interview with Steven Lerman, 10/31/08). Margulies emphasized that “what I cared about was that it reported in at a senior level, because it would get high-level support that way” (interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08).

⁴⁷ Vest also made frequent mention of OCW in published articles and speeches. Brown remarked that he was emotionally invested in OCW from the beginning, and Vest said that his role in the project “was driven by the fact that I instantly was in love with this concept, so that’s a reason that I threw my weight behind it” (interviews with Robert Brown, 10/27/08, and Charles Vest, 9/30/08).

⁴⁸ Interviews with Shigeru Miyagawa, 10/29/08, and Anne Margulies, 10/28/08.

⁴⁹ Interview with Steven Lerman, 10/31/08; Lerman, Steven R., Shigeru Miyagawa, and Anne Margulies, “OpenCourseWare: Building a Culture of Sharing,” in Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, ed. M. S. Vijay Kumar and Toru Iiyoshi, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008, 220.

⁵⁰ Interview with Rafael Reif, 10/30/08.

⁵¹ Vest, Charles M., “Why MIT Decided to Give Away All Its Course Materials via the Internet,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, January 30, 2004.

⁵² MIT OpenCourseWare, “2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report,” June 5, 2006, http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/global/05_Prog_Eval_Report_Final.pdf, 11.

⁵³ “MIT OpenCourseWare: A Proposal,” 14.

⁵⁴ “MIT to Make Nearly All Course Materials Available Free on the World Wide Web,” press release, MIT News, April 4, 2001. OCW materials have subsequently been translated into more than ten languages, through formal translation partnerships or independent efforts.

⁵⁵ Interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08.

⁵⁶ Interview with Steve Carson, 10/27/08. “I would say about a third of our courses are primarily useful only to educators. Another third are useful to both educators and students, and then there’s a final third of our courses that really support independent learning in a significant way.”

⁵⁷ From the perspectives of some of the AllLearn team, MIT’s format was a step backward, as they considered interaction a key source of value for AllLearn. In a Yale Daily News article covering the launch of OCW, Yale President Richard Levin discussed the difference between MIT’s plans and those of the Alliance, saying “We would use the Internet to create online discussions, and our thinking is much more interactive. The MIT approach is just making it available to anyone who wants it” (quoted in Ladine, Bret, “MIT to Offer Access to Materials Online,” Yale Daily News, online edition, April 5, 2001). Stanford Provost John Etchemendy agreed, saying that in MIT’s case, “Putting course materials online is really just a step beyond what universities have always done,” resulting in what he saw as less innovative offerings than AllLearn’s (interview with John Etchemendy, 8/19/08).

⁵⁸ The majority of the course content is delivered in PDF files, and the “back-end” technology is also simple and straightforward, built using off-the-shelf commercial software products (although Margulies said that Microsoft donated substantial resources to customizing their back-end software). The fact that OCW did not use open-source technology drew some criticism, but Margulies defends it as an expedient business decision—evidence of the professionalized, deadline-driven working environment surrounding OCW’s production process (interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08).

⁵⁹ “MIT to Make Nearly All Course Materials Available.”

⁶⁰ Interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08. D’Oliveira agreed, saying “you’ve got to prove to your funders what they’re getting, and the more money you’re getting from them, the more imperative that evaluation is” (interview with Cecilia d’Oliveira, 10/29/08).

⁶¹ Interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08. According to Margulies, the various interested parties were concerned more with using OCW to conduct academic research than with answering the questions about user behaviors that were important to MIT.

⁶² “MIT OpenCourseWare: A Proposal,” 15.

⁶³ MIT OpenCourseWare, “2009 Program Evaluation Findings Summary,” http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/global/09_Eval_Summary.pdf.

⁶⁴ MIT OpenCourseWare, “About OCW: Site Statistics,” http://ocw.mit.edu/about/site-statistics/. In a 2008 publication, Lerman, Miyagawa, and Margulies wrote that “in addition, there are over 100 mirror sites in Africa and Asia that deliver MIT content to users who have limited Internet access. And users have downloaded complete course packages for off-line use over several million times” (Lerman, Miyagawa, and Margulies, “OpenCourseWare: Building a Culture of Sharing,” 216).

⁶⁵ Vest, “Why MIT Decided.”

⁶⁶ “MIT OpenCourseWare: A Proposal,” 15.

⁶⁷ Interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08.

⁶⁸ As Vest stated in 2004, “since we announced OCW, we have received more than 13,000 e-mail messages from around the world endorsing our vision and the potential benefits of sharing knowledge freely” (Vest, “Why MIT Decided”). D’Oliveira said that OCW’s “impact may not be scientifically provable, but we love getting the anecdotal feedback on a daily basis from people who tell their stories. There aren’t many jobs I’ve had where you get that many continual insights into the results of your work” (interview with Cecelia d’Oliveira, 10/29/08).

⁶⁹ Interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08.

⁷⁰ MIT OpenCourseWare, “2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report,” 4, 62.

⁷¹ Education scholar Diane Harley’s research has emphasized this problem, and she notes that”both online surveys and TLA (transaction log analysis) are prone to overlook the universe of non-users. An understanding of non-users and their motivations can be extremely valuable for planning and development” (Harley, Diane, and Jonathan Henke, “Toward an Effective Understanding ofWebsite Users,”D-Li& Magazine13, no.3—4 [March-April2007], http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/harley/03harley.html).

⁷² Vest, Charles M., “Disturbing the Educational Universe: Universities in the Digital Age—Dinosaurs or Prometheans?” Report of the President for the Academic Year 2000-01, http://web.mit.edu/president/communications/rpt00-01.html.

⁷³ Atkins, Daniel E., John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, “A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities,” report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, February 2007, 8.

⁷⁴ Interview with Ira Fuchs, 12/2/08.

⁷⁵ “MIT to Make Nearly All Course Materials Available.”

⁷⁶ Abelson said that while sparking worldwide interest in the creation of OCW was included in the first grant proposal as one of OCW’s original intended outcomes, “the Hewlett Foundation gave specific funding for more aggressive action in the community,” so in later phases OCW went further in that direction using grant money allocated for that purpose (interview with Hal Abelson, 10/31/08).

⁷⁷ Carson said that once the level of interest hit a tipping point, “we decided to bring everybody together to talk about the idea of forming a consortium, and that way we’re creating channels for Tufts to talk to Johns Hopkins to talk to Utah State, because they’re facing different challenges than we were, because we had a lot more money to throw at our problems than they had to throw at theirs” (interview with Steve Carson, 10/27/08).

⁷⁸ Interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08.

⁷⁹ Carson, Steve, “The Unwalled Garden: Growth of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, 2001-2008,” Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, online edition, 24, no. 1 (February 2009).

⁸⁰ Interview with Steve Carson, 10/27/08.

⁸¹ Interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08.

⁸² Interview with Steve Carson, 10/27/08. While some elite U.S. institutions involved in online open courseware projects, such as the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Notre Dame, have joined the Consortium, others, like Carnegie Mellon and Yale, have not. Vest, Carson, and Margulies attribute those universities’ decisions to a sense of competitiveness that makes them reluctant to appear to be in MIT’s shadow.

⁸³ Interview with Steve Carson, 10/27/08.

⁸⁴ Interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08.

⁸⁵ Interview with Robert Brown, 10/27/08.

⁸⁶ Interview with Hal Abelson, 10/31/08.

⁸⁷ Quoted in Goldberg, “Auditing Classes at M.I.T.”

⁸⁸ MIT OpenCourseWare, “2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report,” 4.

⁸⁹ Interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08.

⁹⁰ Interview with Steven Lerman, 10/31/08.

⁹¹ In his 2007 article, Abelson wrote that “of 600,000 monthly visits to the MIT OCW web site in September 2006, 25,000 originated from within MIT itself, a substantial number, considering that there are only about 13,000 students and faculty at MIT, and only 23,000 MIT network users in total” (Abelson, “The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT,” 173).

⁹² MIT OpenCourseWare, “2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report,” 51.

⁹³ “By digitally archiving our faculty’s course materials, we are preserving a record of MIT’s continuously evolving curriculum” (Vest, “Why MIT Decided”). When OCW courses are updated, the old versions are moved to MIT’s institutional repository, where they are permanently archived. Links to those courses remain on the OCW website, so the older versions are still openly available (interview with Kate James, 10/28/08).

⁹⁴ As an indicator of impact, the 2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report states that “OCW is increasingly cited in professional and popular literature as an influential open educational sharing project,” referencing “more than 300 articles in global media” (MIT OpenCourseWare, “2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report,” 4).

⁹⁵ Diamond, David, “MIT Everyware.” Wired, online edition, September 2003.

⁹⁶ Abelson explains the timing of OCW’s announcement this way: “Announcing OpenCourseWare had originally been planned to coincide with the foundations’ funding approval. But as the spring of 2001 progressed, word of the proposed initiative—which, after all, was being widely discussed on campus—began to get around, and there had been inquiries from the local press. So the administration decided to engineer its own news release in a way that it could control the timing, and contacted the Times. The early announcement, as it turned out, proved beneficial, even though it was a bit of a risk, since the proposal to the foundations, submitted shortly after the announcement, was able to highlight some of the enthusiastic responses” (Abelson, “The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT,” 171).

⁹⁷ Diamond, “MIT Everyware.”

⁹⁸ Interviews with Rafael Reif and Susan Hockfield, 10/30/08. Vest said that once the initiative was up and running, “it became clear that this was going to be a very international project, which most of us liked, because this was also the time in which every university [was] beginning to worry about how to globalize, and we felt this was a very efficient and effective way of doing that” (interview with Charles Vest, 9/30/08).

⁹⁹ Vest, “Why MIT Decided.” According to the alumni survey conducted as part of the 2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report, “a strong majority of the MIT alumni (83%) believe the OCW site greatly enhances or enhances MIT’s reputation” (MIT OpenCourseWare, “2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report,” 59).

¹⁰⁰ “MIT to Make Nearly All Course Materials Available.”

¹⁰¹ MIT OpenCourseWare, “2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report,” 3.

¹⁰² Interview with Rafael Reif, 10/30/08.

¹⁰³ Lerman, Miyagawa, and Margulies, “OpenCourseWare: Building a Culture of Sharing,” 221.

¹⁰⁴ Interview with Catherine Casserly, 8/19/08. As previously stated, the Hewlett Foundation defines OER as “free tools and content” that “can include full courses, textbooks, streaming videos, exams, software, and any other materials or techniques supporting learning” (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, “Education: Open Educational Resources,” http://www.hewlett.org/oer). In other words, OER includes, but is not limited to, open courseware.

¹⁰⁵ Figures prepared by Jeff Lazarus, 7/2/09.

¹⁰⁶ Interview with Steve Carson, 10/27/08.

¹⁰⁷ Margulies said that the sustainability question was not a big part of the OCW team’s thinking early on because they were so focused on simply getting the project off the ground: “we were always cognizant that it was looming out there, but we didn’t really have a plan, and we couldn’t devote much time and attention to it until we were midway through the ramp-up phase” (interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08).

¹⁰⁸ Interview with William Bowen, 7/23/08.

¹⁰⁹ Interview with Steven Lerman, 10/31/08.

¹¹⁰ Lerman, “Recommendation of the OCW Faculty Advisory Committee,” 3.

¹¹¹ Interview with Cecilia d’Oliveira, 10/29/08.

¹¹² Interview with Rafael Reif, 10/30/08.

¹¹³ “MIT OpenCourseWare: A Proposal,” 24. According to Steve Carson, since 2007 OCW has been updating about 130 existing courses each year (replacing the old versions), as well as adding about 70 new courses per year (interview with Steve Carson, 12/9/09).

¹¹⁴ Interview with Susan Hockfield, 10/30/08.

¹¹⁵ Reif explained that the annual $2 million given by the Institute’s central funds to OCW is a permanent item in the budget and need not be requested each year. He added a caveat: “We cannot imagine what happens if the MIT budget has to shrink, but I don’t know what that means for OCW any more than I do for the electrical engineering department or anything else we fund. Once something’s in the budget, it doesn’t have to be justified every year; it’s just part of what we do” (interview with Rafael Reif, 10/30/08).

¹¹⁶ Interview with Steve Carson, 10/27/08.

¹¹⁷ MIT OpenCourseWare, “MIT OpenCourseWare Diversifies Revenue Approaches,” press release, January 28, 2010, http://ocw.mit.edu/about/media-coverage/press-releases/revenue/.

¹¹⁸ Reif revealed that a member of MIT’s development staff has been identified to aid OCW in fundraising: “that’s a link that I wish had occurred earlier” (interview with Rafael Reif, 10/30/08).

¹¹⁹ Interview with Charles Vest, 9/30/08.

¹²⁰ Vest, “Why MIT Decided.”

¹²¹ Albanese, Andrew, “Another First, as MIT Faculty Adopts ‘University-Wide’ Open Access Policy,” Library Journal Academic Newswire, online edition, March 24, 2009. In September 2009 MIT joined four other universities in forming the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity, through which the institutions committed to underwrite the contributions their own scholars make to open-access journals.

¹²² Quoted in Chute, Eleanor, “How to Take a Course at MIT Free—At Home,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, online edition, November 18, 2007.

¹²³ Interview with Charles Vest, 9/30/08.