ONLINE EDUCATION AND OPEN LEARNING: OCW's Next Decade: Reaching One Billion Minds

 

 

 

 

 

 

OCW's Next Decade: Reaching One Billion Minds

MIT's goal for the next decade is to increase our reach ten-fold: to reach a billion minds. We aspire by 2021 to make open educational resources like MIT OpenCourseWare the tools to bridge the global gap between human potential and opportunity, so that motivated people everywhere can improve their lives and change the world.

Human potential is universal; opportunity is not. MIT OpenCourseWare began with the vision that the teaching tools of the world's top learning institutions should be freely available to all humanity: to study, to share, to build upon.
In our first 10 years, MIT has been delivering on that vision. We've reached 100 million individuals to date, people with the ideas, talents and motivation to have enormous impact on their communities, given the opportunity to do so.
MIT's goal for the next decade is to increase our reach ten-fold: to reach a billion minds. We aspire by 2021 to make open educational resources like MIT OpenCourseWare the tools to bridge the global gap between human potential and opportunity, so that motivated people everywhere can improve their lives and change the world.

The Plan

How will we do this? First and foremost, we’ll continue to improve the depth and quality of our core publication, and to improve our site. In addition, we’ve identified four focus areas with the potential to help us reach our goal:
Placing OCW everywhere - We'll make OCW content easy to find, adapt OCW materials to distribution methods such as mobile phones, and develop new approaches to reaching underserved populations.
Reaching key audiences - For more people to get the most out of OCW, we have to put more in. We'll customize OCW to meet the needs of people across a wide range of cultures and backgrounds.
Creating communities of open learning - We'll create an ecosystem for open learning that goes beyond content. Over the next decade, we'll take advantage of new technologies to ensure people can interact around OCW, increasing their understanding of the material.
Empowering educators worldwide - Educators are a key multiplier for us. By bringing OCW materials into their classrooms, they share our content with millions. We will strive to provide educators everywhere with the tools they need to serve these students.

Next Decade Alliance

OCW's Next Decade Initiatives are supported by our Next Decade Alliance sponsors.

» Learn more

Next Decade Alliance 

 

 

 

 

An Alliance for Innovation
In our first ten years, OCW has provided resources to 100 million people worldwide. By the end of our next decade, we aspire to reach one billion people with our materials. We are seeking a select group of elite corporate underwriters to join OCW in reaching this goal.
Next Decade Alliance members receive tangible benefits from their role in helping to shape the future of education on the Web, while providing the resources OCW needs to continue innovating in our next ten years. Members of the Next Decade Alliance enjoy the following benefits:

• Branding on the OCW home page and Next Decade page
• Membership in the Next Decade Alliance advisory council, meeting twice a year with MIT thought leaders to help shape the future of OCW
• OCW Next Decade Alliance logo for your site and marketing materials
• Underwriting messaging across the OCW site
• Underwriting message in the OCW newsletter (145,000 self-subscribed)
• Recognition at events celebrating OCW’s 10th anniversary

Next Decade Alliance members may complete their underwriting benefits portfolio with additional opportunities, including:

• Custom course list on our site, with your branding, highlighting the courses most relevant to your customers or workforce
• Recruiting messaging on the OCW site
• Recognition at the 2011 OpenCourseWare Consortium annual meeting

Become a member of the Next Decade Alliance. To develop your custom underwriting benefits portfolio, please contact the underwriting team at ocw-underwriting@mit.edu.

MIT OpenCourseWare's First 10 Years: 100 Million Served

On April 4, 2001, MIT announced it would publish educational materials from all of its courses freely and openly on the Internet. Ten years later, OCW has shared materials from more than 2000 courses with an estimated 100 million individuals worldwide. Join us in celebrating the 10th anniversary of this groundbreaking effort.

Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free

By CAREY GOLDBERG
Published: April 04, 2001

Other universities may be striving to market their courses to the Internet masses in hopes of dot-com wealth. But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has chosen the opposite path: to post virtually all its course materials on the Web, free to everybody.
M.I.T. plans on Wednesday to announce a 10-year initiative, apparently the biggest of its kind, that intends to create public Web sites for almost all of its 2,000 courses and to post materials like lecture notes, problem sets, syllabuses, exams, simulations, even video lectures. Professors' participation will be voluntary, but the university is committing itself to post sites for all its courses, at a cost of up to $100 million.
Visitors will not earn college credits.
The giveaway idea, President Charles M. Vest of M.I.T. said, came in a ''traditional Eureka moment'' as the institute -- like nearly every other university -- brainstormed and soul-searched about how best to take advantage of the Internet.
Called OpenCourseWare, the initiative found broad resonance among the faculty members, said Steven Lerman, the faculty chairman.

''Selling content for profit, or trying in some ways to commercialize one of the core intellectual activities of the university,'' Professor Lerman said, ''seemed less attractive to people at a deep level than finding ways to disseminate it as broadly as possible.''
Universities have been flocking into ''distance learning'' -- offering courses online to off-campus paying students -- and commercial ventures have been investingtens of millions of dollars in the idea. But those ventures tend to pick and choose among courses and professors, rather than trying to offer a whole university in one swoop.
At the same time, on campus, universities have begun creating a great many course Web sites. The University of California at Los Angeles creates a site for every undergraduate course. But those are generally only for internal use, and the M.I.T. initiative appears to dwarf even those internal programs.
''I think everybody else besides M.I.T. is in the position of being more cautious,'' and watching to see what Internet strategy works best, said David Brady, vice provost for learning technologies at Stanford University.

» Read the 2001 announcement in the New York Times.
» Watch the 2001 MIT OpenCourseWare press conference
» Read news and reflections on 10 years of OpenCourseWare