8

CONCLUSIONS

Online courseware is a sign that the changes technology has wrought across every sector of society have begun to penetrate even the most elite universities. While the initiatives profiled here are ancillary to these universities’ core instructional activities, online courseware is a young and evolving field, and these initiatives may be the first inklings of greater changes to come. This chapter, organized thematically to highlight key findings, takes stock of lessons learned to date from the projects discussed here. The subsequent epilogue takes a more speculative view of the possibilities these initiatives might hold for the higher education sector as a whole.

Trade-offs between breadth and depth indicate vastly different ambitions—and intended audiences—from one project to the next.

A key strategic decision faced by providers of online courseware is whether to steer their initiatives toward depth or breadth. The projects profiled here each confronted the choice between producing as many courses as possible, albeit with more limited content or functionality, or concentrating on a small group of the most popular courses and publishing them in a richer format. Fathom did the latter, favoring courses taught by the celebrity professors considered most marketable to a paying audience. The goals of the program were clear from its content choices: the Fathom team hoped to create a product that would spark general consumer interest, and it focused its attention accordingly. Open Yale Courses (OYC) has taken a similar approach to content creation, concentrating on a limited, “best-of” selection of courses that often feature star faculty and favor introductory-level content to appeal to a broad public. OYC courses have also emphasized the humanities, reflecting Yale’s strengths and perhaps filling gaps in the broader field.¹ A careful steward of its brand, Yale was uninterested in creating online presentations deemed inconsistent with the university’s reputation for excellence, and this necessitated its “quality over quantity” approach.²

Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) also takes a high-production-value approach to a small number of courses, but in a very different way than OYC. Rather than publishing professors’ preexisting teaching materials or capturing lectures on video that were originally designed for face-to-face delivery, the OLI asks faculty to work with a team of experts to redesign their courses. This process is intended to optimize each course for web-based delivery, building complete interactive experiences that help achieve strong learning outcomes. This approach results in a labor-intensive design process, so the OLI must rely on faculty who are particularly committed to the idea. Furthermore, the expense of developing a single course has limited the number of courses the OLI has been able to produce thus far to about a dozen.

In contrast to these highly curated initiatives that select only a small portion of the university’s courses for publication, MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is notable for its comprehensiveness. Virtually all of MIT’s curriculum is represented, with about 2,000 courses at the time of writing. MIT opted for a comprehensive model to demonstrate the range and depth of the university’s departments, to avoid picking favorites among the faculty, and to achieve the greatest possible impact—in the process creating a sensational story that captured the public’s attention.³ The program’s exhaustive nature was announced before a single OCW course had been produced, and faculty participation was voluntary (though certainly encouraged at the highest levels of the Institute). To encourage participation, OCW had to minimize its impact on faculty time. It did so by repurposing existing content wherever possible and setting relatively low thresholds for the amount of content that must be incorporated into OCW courses. Though these measures have contributed to impressive participation rates, they have also led to inconsistency among the courses: while many have complete lectures with student notes, readings, and rich media features, others are little more than course syllabi.⁴

Publishing preexisting materials on the web—which can require that professors merely forward documents to a project staffer or allow their lectures to be recorded—places a relatively light burden on the faculty.⁵ By contrast, developing pedagogically effective courses for online delivery requires significant commitments of professors’ time. The OLI asks much more of its participating faculty members than do the other programs, as they are required to work with a team of experts to completely re-envision their courses. These divergent approaches to content creation are reflected in vastly different costs per course: dividing MIT OCW’s budget by the number of courses produced works out to $10,000-$15,000 per course (although costs are closer to $25,000 for the relatively few courses that contain lecture videos), whereas the OLI has spent up to $1 million to develop a single course.⁶ Initiatives based on advanced online pedagogy are thus difficult to scale, whereas MIT’s simpler approach—relying largely on text-based content, much of which existed prior to the OCW project—enabled it to cover the university’s entire curriculum.

Production quality also varies among online courseware projects, as OYC and webcast.berkeley illustrate. Both offer audio and video recordings of faculty lectures, so the differences between the two are in degree, not in kind. Yale Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer explained that “our model here was to say ‘how do we get as close [as possible] to having a full Yale College course?’”⁷ In addition to including syllabi, reading lists, and problem sets alongside the recorded content, Yale attempts to convey a sense of “being there” to viewers through high production values. Two camera operators film each course session, and professional recording and thorough editing give OYC’s courses a polished look and feel (Figure 8.1). An article in Inside Higher Ed commented that “unlike the static cameras and uneven quality of lectures on the University of California at Berkeley’s YouTube portal, for example, Yale’s appear professionally produced.”⁸

The Berkeley team does not deny the differences between the two approaches. Webcast manger Benjamin Hubbard characterizes their production process as “focus[ed] on automation and efficiency and economies of scale.” In contrast to the 25 courses OYC has produced to date, webcast.berkeley has captured nearly 550 courses without the support of outside foundation money. Given the project’s ambitions and available funding, Hubbard concluded that for Berkeley, “having a really high-touch production process didn’t seem feasible, practical, reasonable.”⁹ The relative emphasis placed on production quality by Yale on the one hand and Berkeley (and the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning [NPTEL]) on the other is aligned with the programs’ different goals and intended audiences. Yale wants to represent the institution at its best on a world stage, necessitating a sophisticated look and feel for the courses, whereas Berkeley and NPTEL consider themselves primarily student services (Berkeley to its own students, NPTEL to engineering students throughout India), so the level of polish seems to be less important.¹⁰

Online courseware initiatives also vary in their approaches to intellectual property (IP) issues that arise when content originally intended for classroom delivery to a live, enrolled student audience is published on the web. MIT places a premium on creating a fully vetted and compliant publication, staffing its IP clearance operation with two full-time employees. The bulk of OCW’s IP concerns arose from the inclusion of third-party materials—diagrams and images from copyrighted sources, practice problems from textbooks, excerpts of work by other authors. The production process was designed to thoroughly scrub the online versions of any content that might constitute a copyright infringement. This has often meant excising that content from the OCW course if the proper permissions cannot be obtained.¹¹ Conversely, Yale’s approach to IP has frequently relied on the legal concept of fair use—which allows limited amounts of copyrighted content to be used for educational purposes without the need to secure permission—to justify retaining third-party content in its video lectures. This strategy fits OYC’s overall goal of simulating the Yale classroom experience for the home user—an illusion that would be shattered if materials were redacted from the online courses.¹²

FIGURE 8.1 Still from Open Yale Courses lecture video, MUSI 112, “Listening to Music,” session 5, with Craig Wright, Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music (as taught in fall 2008). In OYC’s “Listening to Music” course, the camera follows Professor Wright as he moves from the blackboard to the piano and back, focusing in as he plays and then panning out to show the backs of students’ heads in the front row—a “reality effect” that re-creates the view of a student in the lecture hall for those accessing the course video online.

Available at http://openmedia.yale.edu/projects/media_viewer/video_viewer2.php?window_size=large&type=mov&title=MUSI%20112%20-%20Lecture%205%20-%20Prof.%20Craig%20Wright&path=%2Fcourses%2Ffall08%2Fmusi112%2Fmov%2Fmusi112_05_091808.mov. Permission provided courtesy of Yale University. © 2008 Yale University. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

The efficiency that characterizes webcast.berkeley’s production process carries over to its comparatively less intense approach to editing and vetting its content. Rowe said that when he began webcasting lectures through the Berkeley Internet Broadcasting System (BIBS) project, he “turned a blind eye” to copyright but awaited objections from the rights holders. None came.¹³ Since then, webcast .berkeley’s approach to IP issues has changed little. Hancock attributed Berkeley’s IP procedures to the initiative’s budget constraints: “We don’t have the resources to do a lot of IP review,” she said. “We go through every course and check, but we are willing to take more risk than some of our peers in that area.”¹⁴ Members of the NPTEL team take a similar approach: Ananth observed that NPTEL is probably far less concerned with vetting content for IP compliance than some of the other online courseware programs, but that Indian society is also less litigious and therefore thinks far less about IP than the West.¹⁵ Krishnan stated that the burden of removing uncleared third-party content from NPTEL falls to faculty and that, in general, IP issues “are not vetted carefully. OCW has probably done that much more thoroughly.”¹⁶

Despite webcast.berkeley’s comparatively lax approach to IP, it has never fielded a single copyright complaint.¹⁷ Yale has not experienced negative ramifications from its liberal deployment of fair use either, leading Sheree Carter-Galvan, an attorney in Yale’s Office of the General Counsel who has consulted with OYC on IP issues, to conclude that the considered application of fair use is a sensible solution for online courseware projects: “Universities need to be more confident in their application of fair use.”¹⁸ Other members of the OCW community seem to be reaching similar conclusions. Lindsey Weeramuni, MIT OCW’s rights manager, described how her team worked with others in the online courseware community, including OYC, to develop a code of best practices for fair use modeled on a similar code compiled by documentary filmmakers.¹⁹ Weeramuni remarked that in the past, “Folks [were] afraid of the idea of getting sued so they haven’t even tried [to incorporate fair use], but it’s turned out that the actual risk of that happening is just so low.”²⁰ MIT has not yet committed to any actual policy changes, but a shift in IP protocols in the direction pioneered by OYC is being discussed at high levels. Thus, subsequent evidence has indicated that perhaps MIT’s initially conservative approach to IP was unwarranted—though as a first mover in an untested field, the Institute’s decision to minimize risk in the early years may have been prudent.

In general, the initiatives profiled here have focused on converting existing content that was developed for face-to-face delivery into digital form for web-based delivery—giving their existing content a “digital facelift” by making it accessible online, but not transforming it to take better advantage of the possibilities of this new medium.²¹ Some programs, such as MIT OCW, have chosen to not prioritize complex redevelopment of materials for the digital environment in order to avoid complicating an already difficult task. “This was going to be a big, big project to get 1,800 courses up, and there were going to be lots of people wanting to attach different types of add-ons to it or other agendas to it,” OCW external relations director Steve Carson said. And “anything added to it—any bit of drag—was going to really endanger the overall success of the project.”²² This degree of focus in the project’s scope can be seen as a virtue, but it has also been recognized as a limit on OCW’s potential impact. As former President Charles Vest pointed out, MIT OCW does not provide a true educational experience on the web, because “real education requires interaction, the interaction that is part of American teaching.”²³

Of the initiatives profiled here, the OLI is the only one that has pursued a more interactive educational model focused on learning outcomes, which necessitated a thorough redesign of its course materials for the online environment. The OLI’s unique strategy has focused on “the ability to embed assessment mechanisms” within its courseware, a factor that Candace Thille has argued differentiates its approach from that of OCW.²⁴ The OLI’s cognitive tutor technology raises fundamental questions about the very nature of teaching, both at a distance and potentially in on-campus settings as well: it may be, in Provost Mark Kamlet’s words, a “game-changer.”²⁵

These initiatives were motivated by the availability of intellectual resources at the respective universities more than by an identified, specific need on the part of external constituencies. In other words, these projects have been driven primarily by supply, not demand.

In a 2009 article in Science, former Hewlett Foundation education program director Marshall “Mike” Smith wrote that “we do not know what the demand is for [Open Educational Resources (OER)], how to use supply to increase demand, how to make use more probable, how best to measure use, or what we might consider to be little or great amounts of use.”²⁶ As Smith’s article implies, demand for free enrichment materials from these institutions was assumed but not clearly identified. Use cases were imagined, but knowledge of potential users was vague.

The online courseware projects profiled here were launched because the universities involved had confidence in the value of the content they could provide. The rhetoric associated with these initiatives often suggests that giving away the material would constitute an enormous contribution to society. MIT’s Charles Vest has written that one motivation behind OCW was the conviction that “MIT had something special to offer.”²⁷ Discussing the demand for OYC materials, Linda Lorimer of Yale said that “when you think about what need existed in the world, you can turn it on its head and say ‘how might we . . . take our intellectual treasury, which is manifested in classroom teaching, and have more people benefit from it?’”²⁸ And the director of IIT Bombay, Devang V. Khakar, described the IITs’ interest in developing an initiative like NPTEL in similar terms: “IITs get very generous funding for all kinds of facilities, and there’s been a lot of expertise built up over the years, so this comes from an interest in sharing what we have with places that are not as well endowed.”²⁹

Each of these initiatives is predicated on the assumption that content from these universities will be valuable to audiences outside the academy. Elite institutions, however, do not necessarily have expertise in educating the general or global public. Most of these projects offer a window into the universities’ existing individual courses and perhaps the overall design of their curricula.³⁰ But making something transparent does not necessarily make it useful to potential audiences. In some cases external users may derive value from seeing digital versions of materials designed for in-class delivery, but in other cases they may not.³¹ The OCW and OYC sites are not overtly geared toward a specific demographic; both initiatives consider their audiences to be teachers, students, and lifelong learners from all over the world—categories into which virtually anyone could fit.³² NPTEL’s approach has been somewhat different, in that it began with a more concrete use case than most other open and free courseware efforts. Its intended audience is composed of Indian college students at other institutions, rather than a general audience of students, educators, and lifelong learners worldwide. Furthermore, in NPTEL’s case, the involvement of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) formally connects the project to a partner charged with understanding national educational needs.³³

Most online courseware initiatives received funding and launched their operations without presenting much evidence of direct public demand for free course materials from elite universities.³⁴ Fathom and AllLearn found that demand for non-credit-bearing enrichment courses from elite universities was insufficient to cover these projects’ costs. By contrast, the remarkable financial success of for-profits like the University of Phoenix indicates that there is high demand for some types of credit-bearing online courses. But free and open initiatives launched in the wake of Fathom and AllLearn’s failures have not encountered signals of success in the marketplace, suggesting that the level of demand for materials provided by MIT OCW and similar initiatives may be quite high, but is also very difficult to gauge.

To date, the market research and data-driven assessments of online courseware offerings have been relatively circumscribed, limiting these initiatives’ ability to determine their overall impact.

A profit-seeking project like Fathom had a bottom line: its balance sheet determined its failure. But many university activities do not interact directly with the market and must therefore rely on other metrics to gauge success or failure. In Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line, David Kirp writes that “embedded in the very idea of the university . . . are values that the market does not honor: the belief in a community of scholars and not a confederacy of self-seekers; in the idea of openness and not ownership; in the professor as a pursuer of truth and not an entrepreneur.”³⁵ Yet while the value of something like an academic department cannot always be clearly assessed in financial terms, success can be evaluated to some degree based on well-understood metrics like faculty publishing records, number of undergraduate majors, and faculty and graduate student recruiting—all measured against similar departments elsewhere or different departments within the same university.

The free and open courseware programs profiled here—and many others like them—face the challenge of developing sound and relevant metrics in the absence of clear market signals. Even in an altruistic endeavor, efficiency and effectiveness should be a priority. For the majority of the free and open initiatives, success has been defined by positive impact on the world—a worthy goal, but one that is ambiguous and difficult to measure. If these projects are to determine what sort of outcome would constitute a solid return on investment, more work must be done to clearly define benchmarks and develop better metrics to articulate objectives and reliably judge success.

One challenge in project evaluation in this field stems from the fact that, when it came to desired levels of usage for these resources, few tangible markers of success were established at the outset or required by funders. For the Hewlett Foundation and its grantees, this was intentional. At least in the early years of the OER program, Hewlett felt that, as former program officer Catherine Casserly said, “you have to have enough content out there before you can study use.” Seeding the nascent field by supporting content projects was the Foundation’s first priority, and serious study of usage was largely tabled for the future.³⁶ Casserly added that the Foundation also opted not to press for metrics early on so as not to discourage projects from innovating and taking risks in terms of content.

These projects have nevertheless made consistent efforts to tabulate and analyze the traffic on their websites—which often reaches tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors per month—and have also conducted surveys that reveal their users to be globally dispersed and generally quite satisfied with the content. Through content partnerships with other universities around the world, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Yale know that their materials are being incorporated into curricula elsewhere, and MIT OCW courses have now been translated into at least ten languages.³⁷ In addition, voluminous anecdotal feedback—often in the form of grateful emails pouring in from users all over the world—provides impressive and often emotional testimonials from users describing the impact the courseware has had on their lives or classrooms.

Around 2008, the Hewlett Foundation began to encourage grantees to adopt Google Analytics, which provides a first set of comparable data between online courseware projects.³⁸ As is evident from Figure 8.2, MIT OCW’s traffic far outpaces that of the other initiatives. Analytics data applies only to visits to these projects’ primary sites; MIT OCW, OYC, and webcast.berkeley courses are also available through secondary distribution sites such as YouTube and iTunes U, so their content is viewed in some format more frequently than these numbers reflect. These data are consistent with MIT OCW’s position as the most established, comprehensive, and widely known of the initiatives profiled here.

Beyond counting visits and pageviews, usage data can provide insight into the sources of traffic and allow project leaders to get a better idea of how users find their site (directly or via search engines), as well as users’ locations. Benchmarking different aspects of these projects against one another is revealing. Figure 8.3 shows that, in addition to receiving more traffic than the other three initiatives, MIT OCW also attracts the highest percentage of users from around the world—a strong indicator of international awareness of the site (even without taking into account usage of mirror or translation sites carrying OCW content). A more granular breakdown of visits by city is also available; as might be expected for an initiative conceived primarily as a student service, 12 percent of webcast.berkeley’s traffic in 2009 came from Berkeley, while 2 percent of MIT OCW’s (considerably higher) visits came from Cambridge. Usage patterns are reflective of the differing goals that these initiatives have set for themselves, and they may have implications for specific outreach and marketing strategies if increasing traffic is an objective.

FIGURE 8.2 Usage data by initiative, 2009–10. Four of the projects profiled here granted permission to view their Google Analytics data. This graph shows the number of unique visitors per month to each site from March 2009 to March 2010. OYC’s data begin in June 2009 (the first full month of data available, as this initiative was the last of the four to adopt Google Analytics).

Ideally, usage analysis would empower these initiatives to understand the full range and depth of uses to which their materials are put. But while raw analytics are helpful in gauging the traffic websites attract, this method does not offer insight into how exactly the materials, once accessed, are used, or how effective they are for learning.³⁹ Anecdotal feedback and voluntary user surveys generate more qualitative data than mere hit counts can provide, but reliance on these methods also biases results toward the most opinionated and invested users, without indicating what percentage of the overall user population this group constitutes.⁴⁰

FIGURE 8.3 U.S. versus non-U.S. traffic, 2009. Using Google Analytics’ breakdown of visits by country, this graph shows the percentages of U.S. versus non-U.S. visitors from January 1, 2009, to December 31, 2009. OYC’s data include only the period May 8, 2009–December 31, 2009 (the only available data for that project, the last of the four to adopt Google Analytics).

Stakeholders in public-facing educational projects will in the long term want to know whether end users are actually learning anything from these online course materials. The OLI project is uniquely designed to enable that kind of analysis, as its asynchronous learning environments not only provide constant feedback to the students but also embed assessments of the user experience within the courses themselves. The OLI’s stated goal is to create courseware that can generate learning outcomes equivalent to those of enrolled Carnegie Mellon students taking the equivalent course on campus; head-to-head studies have indicated that students studying statistics via the OLI course learn the material as well as or better than their counterparts in traditional courses. But the other projects profiled here were not designed with built-in mechanisms to generate empirical data on students’ comprehension, and thus they cannot provide their creators with concrete information on learning outcomes.

Of course, any usage that online courseware projects receive is positive. Summarizing the attitude of OYC and many of its peer initiatives toward usage goals, OYC’s Diana Kleiner said, “This isn’t a numbers game, since we’re not making money off this; this is a gift we’re giving to the world, so we want to see if we can bring that to as many people as possible.”⁴¹ But it is also important to establish mechanisms for evaluating outcomes relative to the resources invested and the opportunity costs incurred by pursuing these projects. Now that nearly a decade has passed since the first grants were made in the open courseware field, impact can be considered in the context of the investments made in the creation and ongoing maintenance of these resources. This issue might also be approached by more strictly articulating the user populations that these initiatives can realistically expect to reach and measuring usage against them. For instance, if an initiative like OCW or the OLI feels it could and should be of great use to any undergraduate in the United States, then website hits from that demographic might be productively considered relative to the size of that defined user population.

These projects could also do more to understand not only figures like how many unique visitors they receive, but also how important users consider the resources to be. Online courseware sites like MIT OCW have surveyed users extensively; 80 percent of respondents rate OCW’s impact as extremely positive or positive and 96 percent of respondents would recommend it.⁴² That said, respondents to a voluntary survey posted on a site may be among its most enthusiastic users. And while these users may rate OCW highly, there is more information to uncover about how they value that resource relative to others. A survey of 3,000 faculty at U.S. four-year colleges and universities conducted by Ithaka S+R found that 18 percent of respondents consider “free web-based educational resources such as iTunes U, YouTube EDU and OpenCourseWare” to be very important to their research and teaching; respondents ranked online courseware tenth most valuable of the eleven types of digital resources listed.⁴³ An earlier study by Diane Harley found that faculty at research universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges used “curricular materials and Web sites created by other faculty and/or other institutions” at much lower rates than they reported using other types of digital resources.⁴⁴ It is worth noting that both these surveys focused only on university faculty, who of course make up only a portion of the audience for online courseware; but the approach is one that might be extended to other target populations.

As such outside studies indicate, an expanded usage analysis program would also benefit from paying considerable attention to those who are not currently using the content. Harley points out that creators of digital resources like open courseware do not measure nonuse. If online courseware sites continue to consult and report only raw usage numbers, there will be no way to gauge market penetration by determining if the number of users is significant relative to the overall potential user population, the factors that differentiate a nonuser from a user, or the reasons for nonuse.⁴⁵ Victor Vuchic of the Hewlett Foundation said in 2008 that usage of open courseware projects “is growing rapidly, but is still only a drop in the bucket compared to how many people could be using it.”⁴⁶

These initiatives have certainly done much good, but it is impossible with currently available data to determine how much good they have done. The Hewlett Foundation acknowledges that there is “a clear research gap in OER development” and that “while high-quality content is now openly accessible, evidence is needed of its impact.”⁴⁷ Survey data provide these initiatives with a sense of who uses their materials—people from all over the world and all walks of life, including teachers, students, and lifelong learners. But there has yet to be a systematic and data-driven evaluation of the character and significance of that use across courseware projects. And while enthusiasts in the field are confident that these initiatives will have broad-based or even system-wide impacts on global education, evidence of such disruptive change has not been quantified, nor have research designs for doing so been developed.⁴⁸ Such a study would be of great value to university leaders in determining whether the goals of their projects are being realized by users, as well as to funders in calculating the impacts of their investments.

Though founded as altruistic gestures toward the outside world, some of the free and open courseware projects have yielded significant reputational benefits to the universities that developed them.

Although many of these initiatives were designed for the betterment of the world at large, universities can realize a variety of benefits from their involvement with online courseware. Burnishing the parent institution’s reputation is rarely an explicit component of open courseware projects’ stated missions, but some of the free digital courseware initiatives have nevertheless delivered substantive branded content to broad audiences—and generated considerable media coverage in the process. The effects of these initiatives on perceptions of their parent institutions—in the eyes of the press, of funding agencies, and of the broader university community—are worthy of exploration.

By exposing classroom teaching to the public, these projects have allowed universities to attract attention—and even acclaim—for activities that have always been of central importance but that have historically been difficult to communicate. Berkeley’s former provost emphasized the importance of highlighting the university’s teaching function, particularly for a land-grant institution. “We get the press we get largely because we have famous scientists that are big-time research people. But the people of California value the teaching side over the research side,” former Provost Paul Gray said, “so [webcast.berkeley] is a chance to get some public recognition for the educational role and teaching.”⁴⁹

The media attention that these initiatives generate can be an important asset to their hosts, and participating universities are able to leverage their online courseware efforts to varying degrees, depending on the particulars of each program. For example, the impact an initiative has on public perceptions of its parent university can be linked to the extent of institutional branding on the site. The OYC site makes extensive use of the Yale name, logo, and even colors, rendering the site’s institutional affiliation unambiguous—so good press for OYC is good press for Yale. In contrast, Carnegie Mellon has consciously elected not to incorporate the university’s name into that of the initiative, and it has not made extensive use of its imprimatur past the landing page of the OLI site. The decision to downplay the university’s brand was an effort to encourage adoption.⁵⁰ But by doing so, Carnegie Mellon is perhaps missing an opportunity to further mold external perceptions of the university as a locus of innovative teaching on the forefront of human-computer interaction.

Furthermore, when a consortial or contributed content model is pursued, branding is sacrificed. Adopting a new name to convey the initiative’s joint governance may be a necessary step in founding consortia like AllLearn, Fathom, and NPTEL, in which institution-neutral branding and project names may have helped faculty from different institutions feel comfortable contributing. But this approach dilutes the branding potential for each member institution by subsuming the partners’ existing brands under the umbrella of a new, previously unknown brand.⁵¹

The projects that have done the most proactive marketing outreach have typically generated the most media attention. MIT OCW is a media-savvy project that employs an external relations director, and several individuals involved with the initiative believe that press coverage of OCW has enhanced MIT’s overall brand in the eyes of the public. Fathom also allotted staff to market itself and in turn attracted significant media coverage. The Hewlett Foundation did not grant the OLI’s request for a marketing budget;⁵² perhaps as a result, the project garnered little press attention in its early years. That said, the federal government’s interest in funding online courses under the Obama administration has raised the OLI’s public profile in recent months.

In all of the better-known initiatives—AllLearn, Fathom, MIT OCW, OYC—the university’s president has played a leadership role.⁵³ An enthusiastic president or provost can personally draw more funds to a project, generate high-profile press releases (as seen in Figure 8.4), or discuss the project in a variety of venues—increasing the attention it receives from the media. Funders may also be influenced by the involvement of high-level administrators. The MIT OCW concept was first raised in a faculty committee convened by the provost, and President Vest personally reached out to leaders of the Mellon and Hewlett Foundations to fund it. This signaled to funders a depth of institutional commitment that Lawrence Rowe, the single professor who founded what became webcast.berkeley, could not—perhaps contributing to the fact that this project did not attract outside foundation money.⁵⁴

Of course, press coverage is not always positive. To mount an online courseware initiative has proven to be a risk, as a failed program can draw negative attention. Multiple postmortems of Fathom, AllLearn, and similar initiatives in the education press made reference to the commercialization of higher education, sometimes portraying the universities behind these initiatives as profit-hungry opportunists—and failed ones at that.⁵⁵ The negative light in which a project like Fathom cast its parent university may have made MIT appear all the more altruistic in comparison, perhaps amplifying the positive attention that accompanied OCW’s launch.

FIGURE 8.4 MIT OpenCourseWare landing page (as it appeared on October 13, 2002). The site’s initial webpage announcing the pilot phase of the project featured a prominent message from President Charles Vest, a strong declaration to the public of the institutional support behind OCW.

Available at http://web.archive.org/web/20021014163054/ocw.mit.edu/index.html. © 2002 MIT. All rights reserved.

New entrants to the online courseware field cannot expect to receive the same flood of media attention that MIT did. When asked why other institutions have not launched comprehensive OCW-type efforts, former MIT Provost Robert Brown suggested that “the barrier to entry is enormous for an institution, and the impact of an institution being the second to do it is . . . half as much, maybe even less.”⁵⁶ The level of press attention that MIT has received relative to similar efforts—as Table 8.1 shows, more press mentions by this measure than all of the other open programs profiled here combined—is evidence of a strong first-mover advantage in this space.⁵⁷ In this respect, there are likely to be declining marginal benefits for new entrants if each university mounting an open courseware initiative hopes to appear uniquely generous. In addition to the final tallies, it is worth noting trends over time in the data presented: MIT OCW received its highest number of annual press mentions the year prior to the site’s launch, generating buzz that undoubtedly influenced the traffic it received. In contrast, the OLI launched in 2003, but it did not receive heightened attention in the press until the start of the Obama administration in 2009, when the initiative became closely linked with the federal government’s plans to develop a national clearinghouse of freely available online courses.

TABLE 8.1
Annual Press Mentions of Online Courseware Initiatives, 2000–10

Notes: Shading indicates years non-operational; X indicates no press mentions.

Only substantial mentions and not cursory listings of these selected online courseware projects were counted. “Press coverage” was limited to the following types of U.S. and international print sources: newspapers, magazines, journals, newsletters, press releases, and newswires. Online media, such as blogs, were not included. “Years operational” refers to the years following the launch of the projects’ websites (and in the cases of Fathom and AllLearn, the end date is the year the initiatives officially ceased operation); any press mentions in years prior to start dates covered the formation of these programs or impending launch of their official web presences.

Press coverage was retrieved only through news sources available in Nexis (http://www.nexis.com). The 1998–2008 data were collected in March 2009, the 2009 data were retrieved in December 2009, and the 2010 data on April 20, 2010.

This table is not presented as a comprehensive listing of every substantial press mention these projects have received over the past decade; to ensure continuity of search methods, only one database has been queried to produce these data. These numbers should, however, offer an approximation of the level of press attention these efforts have received relative to one another.

Data were prepared by Lisa Bonifacic.

In addition to generating positive press attention, open courseware projects can help institutions of higher education communicate their social value to the governments that oversee their budgets or approve their tax-exempt status. Vest discussed the pressure Congress has put on university endowments, which were coming under strict review by the federal government around the time MIT was developing OCW. “So one of the things that I spent a lot of my time on—and not just narrowly for MIT, but for all public and private research universities in general—was promoting here in Washington to anyone who would listen the importance of these institutions and the return to the nation that [they constitute on] investments in science and engineering research and advanced education.” Vest explained that the OCW team did not originally plan to use the initiative for federal advocacy, “but once we launched it, I did often point it out as a way that an institution that had been funded very generously was giving back. And I found that I didn’t often have to be the one to say it; people said it for me.”⁵⁸ Berkeley administrators have similarly pointed to their webcast project as a means of demonstrating the university’s value to the broader public.

Beyond the media and government funding bodies, online courseware projects can help foster positive perceptions of the university among other important constituencies. For example, publishing a suite of free online course content could help a university attract prospective students by showing off the strength of the faculty; such a benefit would align online courseware efforts with investments that institutions are currently making in recruitment brochures or detailed admissions websites.⁵⁹ If advertised to the university’s alumni, those same lecture materials could also help graduates feel more connected to the current life of the institution, as do alumni magazines and reunion weekends. As discussed further in the preceding chapters and the following section, recorded lectures also serve as study aids or expanded course catalogues for enrolled students, and in that sense perform functions similar to those of course management systems and note-taking services.

Based on data collected in user surveys, the MIT OCW team feels confident that the initiative is generating these kinds of returns for the institution. “Over half of incoming freshmen are aware of OCW prior to choosing MIT, and a third of those cite OCW as a significant influence in their choice of school. Ninety-four percent of students at MIT access the site, and half of alumni surveyed use the site.”⁶⁰ But whether familiarity with OCW—by prospective students, enrolled students, or alumni—translates into tangible gains for the university is difficult to determine.⁶¹ In this sense, online courseware projects face a dilemma similar to that of more explicitly media-focused public relations activities. As a recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece by a head of university public relations states, “We have faith that the news-media coverage contributes to the college’s overall identity and enhances its image, even if we cannot measure exactly how.”⁶²

In sum, while the free and open courseware initiatives themselves; the foundations, institutional leaders, and governments that support them; and the press that covers them have emphasized the good that these efforts do for the world at large,⁶³ the internal impacts of these initiatives should not be discounted—and may prove just as important (if not more so) to these projects’ continued success and sustainability.

Long-term financial sustainability remains an unresolved issue for most of the free and open courseware projects examined in this book.

Discussing free and open online courseware projects for a 2009 Fast Company article, Catherine Casserly of the Hewlett Foundation commented that “the advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field.”⁶⁴ But while the marginal costs of digital distribution of content are much lower than those of print, there are still significant upfront costs associated with the production of courseware. Even after materials have been developed, the server capacity and bandwidth associated with disseminating these materials to users remain ongoing expenses. Furthermore, given the constantly evolving digital environment, courseware initiatives cannot remain static, but must adapt to meet contemporary format standards and user expectations.⁶⁵ These projects therefore need to develop strategies to pay not only for recurring operational costs, but also for investments in continuing innovation.⁶⁶ Third parties like foundations covered the start-up costs of content development for many initiatives, but they may be reluctant to pay for ongoing operations, so finding a regular source of funding to offset these costs is a key sustainability challenge facing the field.

With the exception of webcast.berkeley, the open courseware initiatives profiled here were launched using outside funding, with the Hewlett Foundation playing a primary role.⁶⁷ Hewlett and Mellon funded most of the start-up costs associated with MIT OCW; Hewlett was the major source of seed capital for the OLI and OYC; and the Indian government has bankrolled the NPTEL start-up costs.⁶⁸ Because the field was so new, funders typically did not require projects to have definite business plans to support ongoing operations after initial grants had been spent. According to Marshall “Mike” Smith, former director of Hewlett’s education program, Hewlett has asked grantees to “address sustainability,” but in the initial grant proposals it did “not ask people to propose a model itself.”⁶⁹ Hewlett has, however, required that the funded portions of these projects remain openly accessible (i.e., without fees for access or use) in perpetuity. In MIT’s case, the Institute pledged to “assume full responsibility for the costs of sustaining OCW as a permanent activity” once the project reached its so-called Steady State phase.⁷⁰ But as these start-up grants near completion—and as the Hewlett Foundation’s priorities shift away from institution-specific open courseware programs in favor of OER projects like open textbooks, open educational games, and uses of open content in the K-12 sector—Hewlett has begun formulating an “exit strategy” from these initial investments.⁷¹ The need for sustainability models is therefore becoming more immediate.

The availability of significant grant funding has allowed many initiatives the flexibility to experiment with creative approaches to the production of courseware, but it has also meant that long-term sustainability planning has been a lower priority; developing practical sustainability solutions is often supplanted by more immediate concerns.⁷² OLI co-director Joel Smith said that in the OER world, members of the community would often “try to have a meeting about sustainability and . . . all dance around it, and that’s something we really need to figure out.” He added that “when one of these things blinks out, I’m not even sure that’s going to be a wakeup call. Lots of powerful but little-used digital environments have just disappeared, and that’s something that I fear for all these efforts.”⁷³ At least one free and open courseware project—a Hewlett-funded initiative at Utah State University (USU)—has already shut down.⁷⁴ Yet most of the initiatives profiled here have still not developed comprehensive strategies to address sustainability. Former OCW Consortium Director John Dehlin said that “we’ve been having the same sustainability and the same evaluation conversations for five years, and they’re no more advanced.”⁷⁵

Hewlett’s 2009 education program budget memorandum states that “the issue of sustainability remains complex” and that “clear measures of success are needed for this critical infrastructure dimension.”⁷⁶ As former Hewlett education program director Marshall “Mike” Smith has acknowledged, generating measurable results “and the sustainability goal are very tightly linked. The more we can make it obvious that the open materials are helping to solve certain educational problems, the more likely we are to move . . . to an overall sustainable system.”⁷⁷

University funding may be the most obvious source of support for these initiatives, but there is no guarantee that the parent institutions will be willing to shoulder the burden of funding them in perpetuity. Open courseware initiatives have always received some degree of in-kind support from their affiliated institutions in order to minimize direct costs. But if that support must increase to cover the costs of staffing and operating these resources when foundation capital expires, project leaders may feel additional pressure to demonstrate their initiatives’ value to the parent institutions, their connection to the universities’ overall strategic priorities, and the degree to which they have taken root within the university communities. Two examples illustrate the importance of these factors: while the OLI reflects Carnegie Mellon’s interdisciplinary and data-driven ethos, it involves relatively few faculty members, and the university’s provost has expressed strong reservations at the prospect of committing to fund this project indefinitely. In contrast, MIT OCW engages virtually every faculty member on campus and has been championed by university leaders from the beginning; the Institute has subsequently committed to providing a portion of the program’s operating budget on a permanent basis.

Of course, the fact that open courseware projects have not been self-supporting and may well require long-term institutional subvention is not inherently problematic. Many university activities—from libraries to English departments—are budgeted as cost centers that rely on continuing institutional subsidy. The university funds them in large part due to their direct benefit to enrolled students and to local faculty. But issues of sustainability and institutional funding are much more pressing when it comes to public goods such as OER, as these resources are often designed primarily to benefit audiences outside the university community. So the question is not only whether the parent institution can sustain an open courseware project in this economic climate, but rather why it should.

Leaders of several participating universities have described online courseware activities as natural offshoots of the university’s mission—to create and disseminate knowledge and to educate the next generation—in the digital age.⁷⁸ Sharing faculty research and discoveries externally has long been the main vehicle for elite universities to reach a wider public; the host institutions profiled here have traditionally fulfilled the educational component of their missions by providing courses to a relatively small number of enrolled students. To assert that the mass distribution of the university’s instructional content to nonstudents directly contributes to its mission is to view that mission as radically more expansive than it has been historically. Interviews with academic leaders (especially at some private institutions) have shown that, in the context of free and open online courseware projects, leading universities are beginning to explore the boundaries of such an amplified instructional responsibility.⁷⁹

Beyond their fit with institutional missions, continuing internal support for these projects might also be justified by more concrete demonstrations of their local value, as previously discussed. For instance, freely available, open-access online courseware may also prove advantageous in recruiting new students and faculty. Just as universities have increasingly elaborate websites—which have quickly become necessary components of every university’s outreach to prospective freshmen or faculty hires—soon posted syllabi or lecture videos might regularly provide a valuable window into the institution for those interested in formally joining it someday.⁸⁰ Usage by enrolled students, as a study aid or expanded course catalogue, is another plausible justification for ongoing internal support of these resources. Institutional investments in similar student support services are not uncommon: many universities staff a writing center, support course management systems to maintain course materials for enrolled students, facilitate tutoring networks, and encourage students to take advantage of research assistance from librarians. If university decision makers come to view online courseware projects as sufficiently aligned with any or all of these other common efforts, support for such projects might eventually be folded into the university’s general cost of doing business.⁸¹

Some projects have begun to pursue sources of financial support other than institutional funding. For example, several years ago OCW began seeking private donations to cover the portion of its operating budget not provided by central university funding. It succeeded in receiving a $6 million gift from a company founded by an MIT alumna, and in one year generated $150,000 in small donations through direct fundraising appeals.⁸² Since 2005 OCW has also embedded links to Amazon.com in course syllabi through the Amazon Associates Program, and it receives 10 percent of the price of any purchases originating from the OCW page.⁸³

The OLI has gone in a different direction. Its strategic advantages derive largely from its technological and pedagogical approach, which can be applied to many different educational scenarios. As funding agencies have shifted their focus to K-12 education and community colleges, the OLI has reoriented itself toward content of interest to the community college population. The OLI team, with funding from the Gates, Hewlett, and Lumina Foundations, is now at work on the Community College Open Learning Initiative (CC-OLI), in which Carnegie Mellon learning experts and course developers will partner with community college faculty to develop course content for this sector.⁸⁴ The $4 million in additional funds awarded for the CC-OLI effort will allow the project to remain operational but has required it to change course, as the new content it supports will no longer be based directly on Carnegie Mellon courses.⁸⁵ This may be a prudent adaptation to changing circumstances, but it also underscores the challenges Carnegie Mellon has faced in achieving long-term sustainability for its initial offerings.

Free and open courseware projects might also find paths to sustainability by earning revenue directly. This might include a “free-mium” approach—offering the core content freely, as is a common stipulation of grant funding, while also creating enhanced versions that might be sold to users for a fee. The OLI was the first of the projects profiled here to attempt a freemium business model through its Academic Version, which is targeted to faculty using the OLI in the classroom. However, according to project co-director Joel Smith, the fees that the OLI has been able to collect have not been “at a level that provides us with income for sustainability.”⁸⁶ The Hewlett Foundation has expressed support for the exploration of advertising models, but elite universities have thus far opted not to pursue them. “I can understand why some of the higher ed institutions [are] hesitant,” observed Casserly. “Something like advertising is such a cultural shift for academics that it’s going to take time.”⁸⁷

Universities with entirely different approaches to the production of open courseware may be better positioned to achieve long-term sustainability. One model that has shown strong progress toward becoming self-sustaining is that of the Open University (OU) in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1969, the OU UK is a public institution geared toward distance education. With the support of the Hewlett Foundation, the OU UK’s OpenLearn project has made over 5,400 hours of the university’s course content available for free.⁸⁸ Project director Andy Lane has said that links to the paid content on the free and open site have resulted in at least 9,000 new customers for the university’s distance education courses.⁸⁹ For OU UK, continued institutional support for OpenLearn could therefore be justified as a loss leader for the university’s traditional, credit-bearing distance education model.⁹⁰

But OU UK has always been a distance-based institution, and OpenLearn differs from the projects profiled here in that its courses were born digital and always intended for online delivery to the OU’s enrolled students.⁹¹ Institutions like MIT and Yale, which have required a great deal of upfront investment to convert courses designed for face-to-face delivery into digital format but do not offer online credit, would not be able to replicate this model directly. The OU is also a nonselective institution in which nearly anyone can enroll, in contrast to the highly selective residential universities profiled here.⁹² In essence, the OU has added an open and free component on top of an existing, sustainable online business model. The reverse sequence—building the online courseware first and then attempting to find a sustainability model to support it, as the initiatives profiled in this book have done—is proving to be much more challenging.

More radically, open-education enthusiasts like David Wiley and Christopher Mackie have suggested that if universities entrusted enrolled students to create online courseware themselves, with light supervision from tenured faculty or professional staff, the operating costs of such programs could decrease dramatically. The premise of this proposal is that enrolled students would receive university credit for creating high-quality digital materials associated with courses they are taking—and so would not need to be paid.⁹³ Such a cost-saving approach to producing online courseware would obviously constitute a sharp departure from the highly authoritative, faculty-centered content creation model outlined in this book.

By offering content only, without human interaction or university credit, online courseware allows parent universities to explore the opportunities afforded them by the internet without threatening their core value proposition.

Opening up versions of elite university courses to a mass audience can be seen as a radically populist gesture, in that it enables a significantly wider audience to share in some aspects of the university experience. But these activities do nothing to increase accessibility to the most valuable aspect of a university education—the credential or degree. Though they are exposing some course content for public view, by not offering credits associated with their online courseware initiatives, participating universities retain a significant portion of the value they provide only for enrolled students.⁹⁴ Many subsequent factors dictating the shape these projects have taken can be understood in light of that decision.

Declining to offer university credit to online users mitigates the risk of devaluing the traditional degree, maintaining the prestige associated with selectivity (traditional admission) and the on-campus experience (traditional enrollment). By decoupling the traditionally “bundled” aspects of the courses they offer—providing digital versions of course content for enrichment purposes only, yet reserving credit for enrolled students—these universities maintain the scarcity that has defined their business model by limiting access, ensuring that admissions rates stay competitively low.

MIT’s example is instructive, as the university has strived to maintain a sharp distinction between OCW and its enrolled student experience. Members of the OCW team recalled that when the question of offering credits was raised in early discussions, “there was sort of a philosophical resistance to it” among the faculty; MIT alumni also expressed concerns at the thought of granting credit to online users.⁹⁵ Former MIT Provost Robert Brown recounted that in planning the OCW effort, the faculty subcommittee realized that “we’re not trying to devalue the brand, we’re trying to increase the brand. . . . So whatever you do, it can’t be MIT, it can’t quite be us.”⁹⁶ Preserving that distinction between MIT’s online offerings and the university’s degrees required that OCW’s offerings remain strictly recreational and not for credit. As faculty committee member Shigeru Miyagawa said, “We would not offer any kind of MIT credit or degree—we decided that we would not do anything to dilute the MIT brand.”⁹⁷ Clearly MIT and other institutions have determined that giving away their course content does not undercut the value of the traditional university experience, but giving away the credit might—suggesting that universities view their credit-granting role as an essential source of their value.

By declining to offer credits for online courseware ventures, these universities have also saved themselves the logistical complication associated with a highly involved form of e-commerce. Credit-bearing distance programs would require administrative infrastructure—admissions and remote tuition collection processes that would operate on a course-by-course basis, remote evaluations, and so forth—for which traditional universities like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon are simply not set up. (And, as AllLearn found, attempting to sidestep some of these obstacles by obtaining separate accreditation for an independent spin-off is no easy task.)⁹⁸ By not offering fee-based credit for completion of online courses, these universities deny themselves a potentially lucrative revenue stream, but they also save themselves the expense of developing a more sophisticated technological infrastructure.

Former OCW director Anne Margulies said that the idea of offering credit did come up “early and often” in preliminary discussions of OCW, but that in addition to faculty members’ principled objections, there was also “no clear, simple, practical way to pull it off.”⁹⁹ In this respect, Carnegie Mellon’s example is telling: unlike many of its peers, the university seems not to harbor a philosophical objection to offering credit to “outsiders,” but it struggles with practical considerations like finding the right price point for credit-bearing courses.¹⁰⁰ The provost feels it would be unfair to charge less than the $4,000 that Carnegie Mellon students pay per course, but he is concerned that this price is too high to keep pace with the market rate for online distance education courses.¹⁰¹

The content of these initiatives has also been influenced by their enrichment-only status. When courses are offered for credit, a rigorous set of standards must be put in place to ensure that they are pedagogically sound, students are supported, and student learning outcomes are properly assessed. Indeed, the university accreditation process is designed to ensure that an institution’s degree reflects an appropriate educational experience, and faculty committees charged with approving changes to programs of study provide additional safeguards to ensure curricular quality. But universities need not hold themselves to the same standards when it comes to non-credit-bearing entities. Once the university has decided that an offering will not be offered for credit, it has much more flexibility—published course materials need not be complete, and the obligation to provide interactive features or student assessment and feedback is absent. Were MIT OCW courses to be become credit-bearing, they would have to consist of much more than just a syllabus, reading list, minimal lecture notes, and homework problems presented without solutions or the possibility of receiving instructional feedback. But because OCW is designed only for enrichment, MIT need not invest in creating complete online versions of the educational experience its students receive in Cambridge—it can provide course materials, not courses. The same holds true for the many other programs taking a similar approach.

These fascinating experiments reveal an array of creative endeavors to extend the university’s reach. The free and open programs profiled here have many strengths—chief among them that their global accessibility has unlimited potential, enabling free materials to reach a conceivably boundless audience. But this strength comes with considerable challenges. For example, support of openly and freely available courseware raises concerns about ongoing sustainability in a climate of constrained university, foundation, and government budgets. Furthermore, an approach that emphasizes giving away materials to the broadest possible audience may not prioritize rigorous understanding of users and their needs.

This chapter has examined the current state of these projects. But online courseware’s story continues to unfold in real time, and numerous directions for its future development can be envisioned. The following chapter considers the transformations these projects may undergo—and the varied impacts that might arise—should online courseware become an increasingly common strategy for universities in the digital age.

 

¹ Other courseware projects have adopted this strategy, both to distinguish themselves from one another and to highlight a given university’s unique capabilities. Courses from the agricultural sciences department constitute the plurality of Utah State University’s open courses, in keeping with its status as a Western land-grant university. The content of the University of Notre Dame’s OpenCourseWare has a religious bent, including peace studies and courses from its specifically Catholic theology department. As Notre Dame President Father John Jenkins has said, “I am pleased that the University of Notre Dame will be contributing a set of distinctive courses to the opencourseware [sic] collection. It is our privilege to share freely with the worldwide community an intellectual and ethical framework for viewing, confronting, and reflecting upon some of the most complex issues facing our society” (“Welcome to Notre Dame OpenCourseWare,” http://ocw.nd.edu/). For its part, Harvard recently entered the open courseware arena through an arrangement to broadcast philosophy professor Michael Sandel’s popular “Justice” course on public television. The university thus chose to focus its efforts on one star course in an entirely different medium than that employed by the peer institutions profiled here. Airing university content via public television is not uncommon in other countries: as described in Chapter 7, NPTEL courses are available on the web but are also shown on the government-owned educational TV channel Eklavya. Yet Sandel’s course “is the first time that public broadcasters [in the United Sates] can remember a regular college course’s being presented on television” (Cohen, Patricia, “Morals Class Is Starting; Please Pass the Popcorn,” New York Times, online edition, September 25, 2009).

² OYC offers only 25 courses, but all contain highly produced, “hidden camera”–style videos, complete with clean transcription for the remote user’s convenience. Given the expense of the enterprise, OYC cannot easily be scaled up, but its creators’ priority has been to disseminate a few stand-out courses that they feel best capture the Yale student experience.

³ OCW officials also contend that the arrangement of its content according to a course’s position within the overall curriculum adds value in itself, as a user can always find out what comes before a course and what follows it in the sequence pursued by an MIT student. The Institute’s willingness to publish the contents of the entire curriculum also reflects a great deal of confidence in the school’s brand: decision makers assumed that anything produced by MIT faculty would be strong enough to project to the world, as they did not choose only their strongest content in the way that Fathom and OYC did.

⁴ At a minimum, each OCW course should have a syllabus or calendar, subject matter content like course notes or a reading list, and learning activities like homework problems (interview with Steve Carson, 10/27/08). Although MIT has begun to incorporate more video lectures into its courseware in recent years, at its core the OCW project consists of text-based web material for each course. This content is not that different from the internal websites that many universities have established using course management systems like Blackboard. (Indeed, the policy of the University of California at Los Angeles requiring that a website be established for each of its arts and sciences courses dates back to 1997–98; see http://www.college.ucla.edu/iei/.) The most innovative aspect of MIT’s program is not the technology behind it or its content, but rather the university’s willingness to expose that content to the general public.

⁵ For instance, MIT OCW “has kept the time commitment of publishing a course below five hours for most faculty” (d’Oliveira, Cecelia, and Steven Lerman, “OpenCourseWare: Working through Financial Challenges,” MIT Faculty Newsletter, online edition, 22, no. 1 [September–October 2009], http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/221/d%27oliveira_lerman.html). And, as David Wiley and colleagues have recognized, “minimizing the time required of faculty to create an OCW course increases the likelihood that faculty will choose to participate” (Caswell, Tom, Shelley Henson, Marion Jensen, and David Wiley, “Open Content and Open Educational Resources: Enabling Universal Education,” International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 9, no. 1 [2008], article 9.1.1, http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/469).

⁶ For OCW, see MIT OpenCourseWare, “About OCW,” http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/about/about/index.htm, and interview with Steve Carson, 12/9/09. More recent OLI versions of Carnegie Mellon courses have cost around $500,000 to develop, but according to project co-director Joel Smith, “when we were first starting . . . [the cost per course] was closer to $1 million” (interview with Joel Smith, 8/6/09).

⁷ Interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09.

⁸ Guess, Andy, “Open Courses Open Wider,” Inside Higher Ed, December 12, 2007.

⁹ Interview with Benjamin Hubbard, 6/8/09.

¹⁰ In other words, OYC cares about keeping the average user engaged because each user’s experience will affect his or her perception of Yale. The NPTEL team has a different attitude toward essentially similar content, as it does not want to waste effort on entertaining users (interview with M. S. Ananth, 2/14/09).

¹¹ Interview with Cecelia d’Oliveira, 10/29/08.

¹² OYC’s second grant proposal, submitted in 2007, states that “to eliminate portions of lectures because they contain copyrighted third-party content—a strategy that has been utilized to avoid permissioning issues—carries unacceptable pedagogical costs, in our view. The Project is committed to presenting course lectures in their entirety, rather than condensed or redacted versions” (“Proposal to the Hewlett Foundation Education Program,” Yale University, Diana E. E. Kleiner, principal investigator, April 5, 2007, 7).

¹³ Interview with Lawrence Rowe, 6/8/09.

¹⁴ Interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09. Both Hubbard and Hancock mentioned webcast .berkeley’s liberal take-down policy and said that they have not received a single formal request to remove materials from the site.

¹⁵ Interview with M. S. Ananth, 4/2/09.

¹⁶ Interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09. Anup Ray dissented somewhat from the initiative’s stance on this issue, noting that he has “been a very strong voice in NPTEL from the beginning that we need to ensure we don’t violate anyone’s IP. IIT Kharagpur is the only one that has enforced that rule by signing a contract with the faculty before the course is produced—no other IIT has done that” (interview with Anup Ray, 4/3/09).

¹⁷ Nor has NPTEL: Krishnan said that the initiative has a liberal take-down policy, but no removal requests have ever come in (interview with Mangala Sunder Krishnan, 4/1/09).

¹⁸ Interview with Sheree Carter-Galvan, 12/18/08.

¹⁹ The code, a publication of American University’s Center for Social Media, can be found at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/
code_of_best_practices_in_fair_use_for_opencourseware1/.

²⁰ Interview with Lindsey Weeramuni, 8/12/09.

²¹ Clay Shirky, a professor of new media in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, wrote in a 2009 blog post that newspapers could not effectively adapt what had been a successful analog business to the online environment because they did not think it necessary to fundamentally rethink the product for the new delivery platform: “the core assumption . . . was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift” (Shirky, Clay, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” blog post, March 13, 2009, http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapersand-thinking-the-unthinkable/, as cited in a talk delivered by Gardner Campbell and Jim Groom, “No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable about Open Educational Experiences,” 2009 Open Education Conference, Vancouver, August 13, 2009).

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

²³“MIT to Make Nearly All Course Materials Available Free on the World Wide Web,” press release, MIT News, April 4, 2001.

²⁴ Thille said that “OLI and OCW share the belief that knowledge is a public good, and that making it free and open improves the world and doesn’t hurt [the parent institution]. The differences lie in where we see the power in the technology. OCW sees the power in online distribution. We do that too, but I see the most power in the ability to embed assessment mechanisms. And that’s a distinction I don’t want to lose” (interview with Candace Thille, 8/18/08).

²⁵ Interview with Mark Kamlet, 9/11/08.

²⁶ Smith, Marshall, “Opening Education,” Science 323 (January 2, 2009), 93. Victor Vuchic of the Hewlett Foundation attributed this to the experimental attitude with which Hewlett entered into early grants in this area: “We weren’t so focused on the demand audience; it was more just ‘let’s create this and see where it goes’ ” (interview with Victor Vuchic, 8/20/08).

²⁷ 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.

²⁸ Interview with Linda Lorimer, 3/6/09.

²⁹ Interview with Devang V. Khakhar, 4/9/09.

³⁰ With the clear exception of Carnegie Mellon’s OLI, which redevelops courses from the ground up.

³¹ MIT OCW’s Steve Carson admitted that the burden of actually learning something is passed on to the user: “That’s why the expectation was early on that it would mostly be useful for faculty members [at other institutions], because there was the sense that you needed some level of mediation on the other end in order for [the OCW content] to make sense” (interview with Steve Carson, 10/27/08). The authors of a 2008 paper on open courseware also point out that information literacy “goes well beyond merely accessing information, in that it focuses on a person’s ability to strategically employ that information for specific purposes. While access to information is relatively easy to provide, the strategic use of that information requires particular skills that need to be taught, which is much more difficult to achieve in an OCW environment” (Huijser, Henk, Tas Bedford, and David Bull, “OpenCourseWare, Global Access and the Right to Education: Real Access or Marketing Ploy?” International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 9, no. 1 [February 2008], 4, http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/446/1002).

³² As Casserly said of Hewlett’s grantees in OER, “We are very stretched as a program—our target area is the world, the audience is cradle to grave” (interview with Catherine Casserly, 8/19/08).

³³ The MHRD oversees Indian primary, secondary, and higher education, as well as adult literacy. Grants from the MHRD have supported NPTEL since its inception.

³⁴ As Diane Harley has noted, “A ‘build it and they will come’ approach to many university digitization initiatives has precluded systematic investigations of the demand for these resources” (Harley, Diane, Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences, April 5, 2006, http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/digitalresourcestudy/report/
digitalresourcestudy_final_report.pdf, 1-1).

³⁵ Kirp, David L., Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003, 7.

³⁶ “Interviews with Catherine Casserly, 8/19/08 and 4/20/10.

³⁷ There has been a great deal of translation activity in this space over the past decade, particularly in translating MIT OCW content into Spanish (through the international Universia effort led by a consortium of universities in Spain and Latin America) and Chinese (through China Open Resources for Education). Official translations of MIT OCW materials are available in three additional languages (Persian, Portuguese, and Thai), and independent translation efforts exist as well (MIT OpenCourseWare, “Translated Courses,” http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/lang/index.htm).

³⁸ webcast.berkeley has been independently using Google Analytics since 2006; those data are included in Figure 8.2, along with data from the three Hewlett grantees profiled. NPTEL has also been collecting usage data through Google Analytics in recent years, but those figures were not available for inclusion.

³⁹ As Casserly put it, “All data is good—it tells part of the story. Still, we have a lot of challenges with being unaware of what happens when content gets distributed freely” (interview with Catherine Casserly, 4/20/10).

⁴⁰ For a general discussion of these problems, see Harley, Diane, and Jonathan Henke, “Toward an Effective Understanding of Website Users,” D-Lib Magazine 13, no. 3—4 (March–April 2007), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/harley/03harley.html.

⁴¹ Interview with Diana Kleiner, 2/25/09.

⁴² MIT OpenCourseWare, “2009 Program Evaluation Findings Summary,” November 6, 2009, http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/global/09_Eval_Summary.pdf.

⁴³ Schonfeld, Roger C., and Ross Housewright, “2009 Faculty Survey: Key Strategic Insights for Libraries, Publishers and Societies,” April 7, 2010, http://ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/faculty-surveys-2000-2009/Faculty%20Study%202009.pdf, 23.

⁴⁴ For a summary of this study, based on surveys conducted in 2004–5, see Harley, Diane, “Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Survey Explored Scholars’ Attitudes about Educational Technology Environments in the Humanities,” Educause Quarterly, no. 4 (2007), 15.

⁴⁵ Harley writes: “We suggest that, in any study interested in assessing user demand, one key group to include is individuals who do not currently use digital resources, especially if the aim is to increase demand” (Harley, Diane, “Why Understanding Use and Users of Open Education Matters,” 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, 208).

⁴⁶ Interview with Victor Vuchic, 8/20/08.

⁴⁷ William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, “2009 Budget Memorandum: Education Program,” November 17, 2008, http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education-program, 14.

⁴⁸ As Casserly said, “we need to demonstrate the added value of OER to teaching and learning. . . . Essentially it’s an untested market. We need to step in and prove its effectiveness if it’s there—and we believe it’s there, but we need to really demonstrate that” (interview with Catherine Casserly, 8/19/08).

⁴⁹ Interview with Paul Gray, 6/9/09.

⁵⁰ According to Candace Thille, “OLI was designed to contrast to OCW,” and one aspect of this contrast is in the approach to branding. “Even though the OLI’s content is developed at CMU, I wanted it to be useful at other schools, so once you’re inside the learning environment it doesn’t scream Carnegie Mellon” (interview with Candace Thille, 8/18/08).

⁵¹ From a branding perspective, universities may also be strategically interested in developing organized online courseware initiatives to hedge against the institution’s IP becoming available online without a formal home and branded landing page. The ease and ubiquity of uploading content to the web make it almost inevitable that a university’s course materials will leak out, whether through personal faculty websites or student note-sharing services like Harvard’s FinalsClub.com (see Parry, Marc, “Free Web Site Helps Harvard Students Cut Class,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, December 14, 2009). So it may be to the university’s advantage to disseminate that content in a centralized, coherent fashion on a site where the institution can exert some control over its presentation (see Bennett, Drake, “FreeHarvardEducation.com: Does Anyone Own What Universities Teach?” Boston Globe, online edition, December 13, 2009).

⁵² Interview with Candace Thille, 8/18/08.

⁵³ But a passionate administration does not ensure success: in Fathom’s case, this factor alone was not able to trump other problems. From Fathom’s cautionary example, it is evident that if an initiative does not deliver on its stated goals (for Fathom, to be a profitable spin-off) or is unpopular among faculty, it may not survive a transition in the university’s administration. MIT OCW, on the other hand, was sufficiently institutionalized that it continued to receive support through a change in senior administration, with both a new president and a new provost.

⁵⁴ In the early years of the BIBS project, Rowe and Diane Harley shared the concept with some education-oriented foundations, but beyond the Mellon Foundation’s funding of one study associated with a webcast course (Chemistry 1A), foundations did not come forward to support the program’s operating costs. Rowe recalled that “the Mellon guys were around talking about new learning technologies. We tried to get them to fund the webcast stuff, [but] they weren’t interested. We tried to get Sloan to fund it; they didn’t think Berkeley was relevant” (interview with Lawrence Rowe, 6/8/09). Harley, who served as executive director of the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center under Rowe, said that she approached the Hewlett Foundation about funding BIBS in the late 1990s but was turned down (interview with Diane Harley, 8/21/08). Hewlett did, however, fund Berkeley professors Alex Pines and Mark Kubinec in the development of extensions to the Chemistry 1A project that had been primarily funded through the Mellon Foundation’s Cost-Effective Uses of Technology in Teaching program. Once webcast.berkeley was transferred to Educational Technology Services (ETS) in 2001–2, no further attempts were made to secure grant funding for the operational costs of webcasting.

Though webcast.berkeley’s relative lack of administrative championing may have hurt its ability to impress outside funders, Martin Trow argues that there is a positive side to launching innovative programs from the bottom up. At least in the early stages of such a project, Trow claims that “some forms of central planning may be counterproductive. . . . A large public university is too big, and its authority too widely dispersed, to make rapid decisions. Individuals and units need to be able to make many small, rapid, risky, and relatively inexpensive decisions from below and have the opportunities and resources to experiment” (Trow, Martin, “The Development of Information Technology in American Higher Education,” Daedalus 126, no. 4 [Fall 1997], 311).

⁵⁵ The 2009 closure of Utah State University’s OpenCourseWare project was also covered in the press, and in at least one case has been referenced to raise questions about the sustainability potential of all free and open projects in this space (see Parry, Marc, “Open Courses: Free, but Oh, So Costly,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, October 11, 2009).

⁵⁶ Interview with Robert Brown, 10/27/08.

⁵⁷ Naturally this method of counting the raw number of substantive press mentions included in a resource like Nexis has its limitations—for one thing, it cannot convey the quality and reach of the publications in which articles appeared. For instance, Table 8.1 shows the overall number of press mentions for OYC as equal to those of NPTEL, the OLI, and webcast berkeley. Yet OYC received high-profile press coverage—it was prominently, and quite positively, featured in the New York Times Magazine and was the subject of multiple articles and editorials in the education press—within the first two years of the site’s launch, while the media have been much slower to take note of some of these other initiatives.

⁵⁸ Interview with Charles Vest, 9/30/08. Current MIT President Susan Hockfield also brought up OCW in her testimony before the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education—which examined college accessibility, affordability, and accountability—as an example of MIT’s efforts to benefit the greater public beyond the Institute’s walls (Hockfield, Susan, “Testimony Prepared for the U.S. Department of Education, Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education,” public hearing, Boston, March 20, 2006, http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/2nd-hearing/hockfield.pdf, 4).

⁵⁹ At least one OCW Consortium member has explicitly revealed the recruiting motivation behind a distance learning project: a University of Southern Queensland press release announcing an international learning network project states that “in addition to the altruistic motives, the University is also excited about the opportunity the agreement creates in relation to student recruitment” (quoted in Huijser, Bedford, and Bull, “OpenCourseWare, Global Access and the Right to Education,” 4).

⁶⁰ D’Oliveira and Lerman, “OpenCourseWare: Working through Financial Challenges.”

⁶¹ And other parent universities have not undertaken the same sort of polling that MIT has conducted in an effort to quantify strategic benefits back to the institution.

⁶² Powell, Russell S., “The Productive PR Office,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, December 11, 2009.

⁶³ Former MIT Provost Robert Brown pointed out that “when the foundations were funding it, that’s what they were funding—they weren’t funding the internal piece at all” (interview with Robert Brown, 10/27/08).

⁶⁴ Quoted in Kamenetz, Anya, “How Web-Savvy Edupunks are Transforming American Higher Education,” Fast Company, online edition, for the print edition of September 1, 2009.

⁶⁵ Discussing MIT OCW, Catherine Casserly said, “If they don’t evolve, they will become outdated, so it’s a question of how much they want to continue to lead in this space. And I think they’re going to want to, because now their reputation’s riding on it to a certain extent” (interview with Catherine Casserly, 8/19/08).

⁶⁶ For this reason, a recent Ithaka S+R report defines sustainability as “the ability to generate or gain access to the resources—financial or otherwise—needed to protect and increase the value of the content or service for those who use it” (Maron, Nancy L., K. Kirby Smith, and Matthew Loy, “Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today,” Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability, July 2009, http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/strategy/ithaka-casestudies-in-sustainability/report/SCA_Ithaka_SustainingDigitalResources_Report.pdf, 11).

⁶⁷ The Hewlett Foundation’s organizational leadership and funding generosity have been of central importance, both in seeding this terrain and in shaping its open ideology. In fact, it is difficult to imagine how this field would have developed in the absence of Hewlett’s support of it. The Foundation’s major infusion of capital toward open-education projects—according to personal correspondence with program officer Victor Vuchic, nearly $110 million between 2001 and 2010—and its institutional commitment to free and open online courseware have helped shape the business models and access policies in this space.

Since Hewlett created a division of its education program devoted to funding projects of this kind, the model of providing high-quality content from brand-name universities—underwritten by outside start-up funding and available through open licenses—has dominated this sector and informed university thinking around developing such initiatives. For example, although the design and pedagogy of the OLI reflect Carnegie Mellon’s institutional strengths and character, the initiative’s access policy responds to Hewlett’s “open” objectives for grants in its OER division. And, after attempting a revenue-generating model in AllLearn and observing the trajectory of Hewlett’s grant-making in this area, Yale pitched a project aligned with the Foundation’s clearly expressed priorities. For more on Hewlett’s role, and for an overview of the funding it provided, see 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, especially page 5.

⁶⁸ A variety of foreign efforts besides NPTEL have been funded by national governments. For example, the Dutch and Vietnamese governments have made investment in online courseware a national priority, and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the funding arm of the British university system, has seeded strategic courseware investments.

⁶⁹ Interview with Marshall Smith, 8/19/08.

⁷⁰ “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, 16. Not all Hewlett grantees have made similar commitments, and the methods by which MIT would sustain the initiative were not specified.

⁷¹ William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, “2009 Budget Memorandum: Education Program,” 13. Other foundations that seeded this field have also closed or reorganized grant-making programs in this space. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which had invested over $80 million in online education programs since the early 1990s, discontinued its grant-making program in 2009 (Parry, Marc, “Sloan Foundation Ends Major Grant Program for Online Education,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, April 6, 2009). In addition, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, one of the banner funders of MIT OCW in 2001 and a steady supporter of open-source software, another pillar of OER, drastically reorganized its Research in Information Technology (RIT) program in January 2010 (Parry, Marc, “In Potential Blow to Open-Source Software, Mellon Foundation Closes Grant Program,” Wired Campus blog [Chronicle of Higher Education], January 5, 2010, http://chronicle.com/blogPost/In-Potential-Blow-to-Open-S/19519/).

⁷² Moreover, reliance on foundation money also carries the risk that the initiatives may be out of touch with the needs of specific users. As discussed previously, their sustainability is not dependent on financial contributions from customers, which in more traditional marketplaces serve as a common tool for judging the impact and efficacy of services.

⁷³ “Interview with Joel Smith, 9/10/08.

⁷⁴ USU’s OpenCourseWare was shuttered in the fall of 2009, when the university and state legislature did not elect to provide funding for ongoing operations beyond the conclusion of the project’s grants from the Hewlett Foundation (which totaled $4,585,000 for USU OCW and related projects between 2003 and 2007). The project’s charismatic leader, David Wiley, left Utah State for Brigham Young University in the summer of 2008; Utah State OCW’s closure may therefore point to leadership stability as another key factor in achieving sustainability for projects of this nature. Ithaka S+R’s 2009 “Case Studies in Sustainability” report refers to the “what would happen if we were hit by a bus” scenario that plagues projects whose leaders’ personal dedication is crucial to their survival (Maron, Smith, and Loy, “Sustaining Digital Resources,” 14). USU OCW has been the only Hewlett-funded open courseware project to close thus far, and leadership turnover and management issues are seen by some as unique challenges that this project faced. But OCW Consortium president Steve Carson told the Chronicle of Higher Education that this development “points to the issue of having a diversified set of support for your project. If you’ve got one way that the project is being supported, then it obviously puts you at some level of risk” (quoted in Parry, Marc, “Utah State U’s OpenCourseWare Closes Because of Budget Woes,” Chronicle of Higher Education, online edition, September 3, 2009). News of this program’s closure has prompted some in the education press to postulate that more initiatives could meet a similar fate (see Parry, “Open Courses: Free, but Oh So Costly”).

⁷⁵ Interview with John Dehlin, 3/4/09.

⁷⁶ William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, “2009 Budget Memorandum: Education Program,” 12.

⁷⁷ Interview with Marshall Smith, 8/19/08. Smith added that “you can only operate on goodwill and positive motives for so long; at some point you have to make the business case that this thing really is having an effect. It may not be a business case based on dollars, but a business case based on positive results.”

⁷⁸ For instance, the webcast.berkeley team feels that the project directly contributes to UC Berkeley’s public mission as a land-grant university to provide broad access to education. As ETS director Mara Hancock said, “our mission as a public institution—and [particularly] at this institution, being the flagship university for the UC system as well as one of the preeminent public institutions—is to bring that knowledge to the community. We’re funded in large part by the community with public dollars, and this is a way we can give back” (interview with Mara Hancock, 6/8/09).

⁷⁹ MIT president Susan Hockfield sees OCW as compatible with the Institute’s broader mission of “intellectual transfer—moving the things we do on campus out into the world” (interview with Susan Hockfield, 10/30/08). At a speech on the internationalization of the university in Athens in 2008, Yale President Richard C. Levin discussed OYC as an example of his institution exploiting technology to increase access to education: “The Internet offers a whole new range of possibilities for universities seeking to expand and redefine their traditional mission of disseminating knowledge through publication” (Levin, Richard C., “The Internationalization of the University,” speech delivered May 6, 2008, Athens, Greece, http://opa.yale.edu/president/message.aspx?id=7).

⁸⁰ In 2007 David Wiley stated that “about five years from now, everyone’s going to have one of these. It’s going to be part of their Web site, just like when you go to a university Web site now you expect to find information about admissions, registration, tuition and fees” (quoted in Chute, Eleanor, “How to Take a Course at MIT Free—At Home,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, online edition, November 18, 2007).

⁸¹ It is worth noting that if usage by enrolled students is an institution’s sole justification for investment in online courseware, whether the resource is offered openly and freely to the world or hosted on an internal platform is immaterial. Converting preexisting online courseware materials designed for internal usage to open-access versions would require an additional investment of time and money; universities will likely want their course materials to appear more polished if they are posted in public view, and there are IP issues to consider when opening up a university’s course content to the wider world. (Yet webcast.berkeley’s more lenient approach to vetting content for possible IP violations has demonstrated that initiatives which devote relatively few resources to this issue have not faced negative consequences.) But if an institution has already invested in creating this content as a student service and can afford a modest additional investment in preparing the materials for public view, this book has shown that there are important branding opportunities to be realized that may well outweigh such costs—with the added benefit of creating materials that may be of use to the world at large.

⁸² D’Oliveira and Lerman, “OpenCourseWare: Working through Financial Challenges.” OCW is interested in finding more corporate donors in order to explore what it calls “NPR-style underwriting” of content in the future—an approach that emerged from a sustainability planning process in which it engaged consultants from Bain & Company, working pro bono. Bain conducted surveys of stakeholders inside and outside MIT and presented OCW with a slate of possible ideas for generating revenue; Carson said that seeking underwriting funds seemed to be the appropriate course of action because it would not strain the faculty and, unlike more commercial options, would fit with MIT’s institutional values (interview with Steve Carson, 3/18/10).

⁸³ OCW derives “about $30,000 per year” from these Amazon referrals (d’Oliveira and Lerman, “OpenCourseWare: Working through Financial Challenges”), so as Carson has noted, it “doesn’t generate enough income—even at our traffic levels—to make much difference” (personal communication with Steve Carson, 3/11/10), though the arrangement also requires minimal effort on OCW’s part. According to Carson, MIT faculty are allowed to opt out of the Amazon linking from their OCW courses.

⁸⁴ Fishman, Josh, “Community Colleges Get Gift of Millions for Online Education,” Wired Campus blog (Chronicle of Higher Education), December 3, 2009, http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Community-Colleges-Get-Gift/9067/. Also see Carnegie Mellon University, “Three Foundations Grant $4 Million in Awards to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative,” press release, December 15,2009, http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2009/December/dec15_openlearninggrants.shtml.

⁸⁵ Interview with Candace Thille, 10/28/09. In addition to the $4 million awarded for CC-OLI, Carnegie Mellon received funding from the Kresge Foundation in 2010 to support the creation of an OLI “Concepts of Computer Science” course, created with the help of Carnegie Mellon computer science faculty and aimed at undergraduates with nontechnical backgrounds (Kresge Foundation, “Foundation Center: Grant Details,” http://maps.foundationcenter.org/grantmakers/grant_profile_page.php?nonp=1&nof=1&id=16902083&gmkey=KRES002; interview with Candace Thille, 8/11/09). This grant is a positive sign that funds to convert Carnegie Mellon content to OLI format may continue to materialize, though it also illustrates the piecemeal fashion in which the initiative must go about obtaining such funding in the absence of grants the size of Hewlett’s or permanent operational support from the university.

⁸⁶ Interview with Joel Smith, 8/6/09. As stated in Chapter 4, student fees from sales of the Academic Version of OLI courses generated only about $25,000 in the 2007–8 academic year—not nearly enough to cover the costs of a program with an annual operating budget of nearly $1 million. Another Hewlett grantee, the National Repository of Online Courses, has fared better in its efforts to offer its (mostly K-12) content freely and openly for individual use while charging a subscription fee to member institutions that use the materials as part of their regular curricula for enrolled students (see Kolowich, Steve, “Open Courses for Community Colleges,” Inside Higher Ed, April 28, 2010).

⁸⁷ Interview with Catherine Casserly, 4/20/10.

⁸⁸ This figure applies to the period between the project’s start date in 2005 and April 2008 (“About Us: Our Story,” OpenLearn, http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/about-us/our-story.php).

⁸⁹ Interview with Andy Lane, 3/3/09.

⁹⁰ This could be considered a “freemium” model, with the open courses offered for free to drive business to the premium product—the enrolled credit-bearing courses. Relatedly, research on a pilot project conducted by Brigham Young University’s Independent Study program—a financially self-sustaining distance learning program that has recently created open versions of its otherwise credit-bearing extension courses—has shown that opening up versions of these courses does not cause paid enrollments to drop (Johansen, Justin K., “The Impact of OpenCourseWare on Paid Enrollment in Distance Learning Courses,” doctoral dissertation, Brigham Young University, October 2009, http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd3317.pdf).

⁹¹ Of the OpenLearn content, Andy Lane said, “it’s all legacy materials; it already existed” (interview with Andy Lane, 3/3/09).

⁹² “The Open University was established to be ‘open’, with no entry requirements. Nearly all of our courses continue to have no entry requirements” other than that matriculating students must be at least 16 years old (“About the OU: Open Admissions,” http://www.open.ac.uk/about/ou/p7.shtml).

⁹³ Interview with David Wiley, 8/18/09; Mackie, Christopher J., “A Modest Proposal for Utterly Transforming Higher Education Pedagogy and Intellectual Property Generation on the Way to Achieving Sustainable OER—And Why Your Campus Might Want to Try It,” presentation, Open Education Conference 2009, Vancouver, August 13, 2009. Mackie was formerly with the Mellon Foundation’s RIT program.

⁹⁴ Some of the institutions involved in this study do offer forms of university credit online: for instance, Stanford University has a long-standing online masters program in engineering, and the UC Berkeley Extension offers credits to local and online students (see http://extension.berkeley.edu/online/). But these programs are not pathways to credit for the universities’ core undergraduate offerings, which remain limited to traditional, on-campus students.

⁹⁵ Interviews with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08, and Steve Carson, 10/27/08. Carson said that MIT’s unwillingness to give credit partly stems from “the concerns the alumni had: their degree is worth something, and they want to protect the value of that degree.”

⁹⁶ Interview with Robert Brown, 10/27/08.

⁹⁷ Interview with Shigeru Miyagawa, 10/29/08.

⁹⁸ As discussed in Chapter 2, under Herbert Allison’s leadership, AllLearn explored the possibility of obtaining New York state accreditation so that it might offer credits as a pathway to sustainability without encroaching on individual member universities’ credentialing policies. But it found that there were too many obstacles to becoming independently accredited (interviews with Herbert Allison, 3/11/09, and Peter Bernstein, 4/28/09).

⁹⁹ Interview with Anne Margulies, 10/28/08.

¹⁰⁰ Interview with Mark Kamlet, 9/11/08.

¹⁰¹ Interview with Joel Smith, 9/10/08.