MIT Offers Online Courses
Beginning in March of 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT began making some 1,500 MIT online courses available to students of all ages, via the Internet, called OpenCourseWare@MIT (OCW). By the end of this year, the entire course catalogue of 1,800 MIT course, both graduate and undergraduate will be online. Some of the courses change periodically so check the website to get an up to date listing of MIT online courses offered.
These MIT online courses will cost the school approximately $100 million dollars, and is jointly funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and MIT. But for those seeking to learn, these MIT online courses will be offered free of charge to anyone wanting to take them: students, educators, and an avid learner. The catch? There really isn’t a catch, the only thing different about these free MIT online courses are that they are not for credit.
Why would someone want to take MIT online courses but not get credit for them? MIT students and others use the MIT online course programs and practice exams to help them determine which course to take in upcoming semesters, either at MIT or other colleges or universities, both traditional and online.
Other people who are drawn to the courses are what MIT calls “self-learners” – people who are neither students nor educators but take the MIT online courses just to broaden their horizons, to learn something new, for the sheer joy of learning.
Why would MIT put its entire course catalogue online for free when other online universities and colleges are charging a fee for their course? Granted they are also giving credit for these online courses. But MIT believes knowledge should be in the public domain.
The concept for MIT OpenCourseWare grew out of the MIT Counsel on Education, which in 1999 was charged with determining how MIT should position itself in the growing online learning or distance learning environment. The MIT OpenCourseWare was initiated to provide a new model for the dissemination of knowledge and collaboration among scholars around the world and contributes to the “shared intellectual commons” in academia.
The biggest challenge in implementation of the OCW was not the faculty resistance (there was some, but not much resistance), but the logistical challenges of determining the publication permission for the massive amount of intellectual property that is embedded in the MIT online course materials. The copyright of the MIT OpenCourseWare materials, remains with the MIT faculty and students.
To date, the most popular MIT online course has been an Introduction to Electrical Engineering. Other popular sites include Hip-hop, Holographic Imaging, and “How to Build (Almost) Anything”.
MIT online courses include lectures or presentations that a student downloads as a complete streaming video files and watches on their computer. These seem to be very popular with student studying online. Some of the video presentations are for Physics I, Comparative Media Studies, Brain and Cognitive sciences, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Literature, Women’s studies, and Macroeconomics to name a few.
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