At an event hosted by President Hockfield this afternoon, the MIT community will celebrate a major milestone for the Institute's open publication of course content, OpenCourseWare (OCW). The event marks the publication of core teaching materials--including syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams--from virtually all MIT courses, 1,800 in total. The site includes voluntary contributions from 90 percent of faculty and more than 2,600 members of the MIT community.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman will give the keynote address at the event, which will include a panel on the future of OCW and education with MIT President Emeritus Charles Vest, former Xerox chief scientist John Seely Brown and the chair of India's National Knowledge Commission, Dr. Sam Pitroda. Hockfield will also announce a new OpenCourseWare initiative for secondary education at the event.
First announced in 2001, OpenCourseWare has grown from a 50-course pilot to a site that includes virtually the entire MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Materials are published under an open license that encourages reuse, redistribution and modification for noncommercial purposes.
An estimated 35 million individuals have accessed OCW materials since its launch, 60 percent of them from outside the United States. Nearly 600 courses have been translated into languages including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and Thai. MIT has also provided more than 120 local copies of the site to universities in bandwidth-constrained regions such as sub-Saharan Africa.
No comments:
Post a Comment