When a volunteer organization in Guatemala was working on technologies for a small-scale plastics recycling program, MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) gave them the information they needed to make the program succeed.

Disposable water bottles littered the countryside in Guatemala, and there was no recycling program in place. With no budget for consultants, the volunteers relied on Internet research to solve the problem.

"I returned to OCW again and again for information on plastics, recycling technologies, water filtration, and more. The project was a success, and we could not have done it without OCW,” says Megan Brewster, a volunteer who is among the users of MIT’s OpenCourseWare site known as self-learners. After volunteering in Guatemala, Brewster came to MIT to pursue graduate studies in materials science and engineering.

A revolutionary idea

In the year 2000, an MIT faculty committee on lifelong learning proposed a program that was as straightforward as it was revolutionary — a Web site that would give away virtually all of MIT’s teaching materials for free. MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu) has grown from that bold idea to an unparalleled educational resource that has benefited millions and inspired a global movement. The site contains the core teaching materials — including lecture notes, syllabi, assignments, and exams — for all 1,800 of MIT’s courses, the entire curriculum of the institute freely available for anyone to use.

“The idea is simple: to share our teaching material, our course content, online on the Internet, and make it widely available to everyone who can use it,” says Dick K. P. Yue, professor of engineering.

OCW includes:

• notes from more than 15,000 lectures,
• 9,000 problem sets and 900 exams,
• 1,000 hours of classroom instruction on video, and
• more than 600 courses translated into languages including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Thai.

MIT OpenCourseWare has inspired a consortium of leading universities from around the world to share materials from thousands of their own courses.

MIT OpenCourseWare touches the lives of millions, providing resources and educational opportunities that even a few years ago were simply unavailable. Each month, millions of people from every nation on the globe find helpful information, tools, and inspiration in OCW materials.

Through OCW, students find additional resources to help them succeed; educators improve courses and curricula to make their schools more effective; and working professionals access tools to tackle some of our world’s most difficult challenges — including sustainable development, global warming, and cancer eradication.

The challenge ahead

Publishing all of MIT’s course materials is just the beginning. In the coming years, MIT will be updating courses, adding deeper and richer content across the site, including more audio and video from MIT classrooms. MIT will also be adding site features like the popular zip download service, which has already allowed millions of OCW visitors to place the course materials they want directly on their own computers.

MIT plans to add innovative new services on top of the course materials published, such as the new Highlights for High School portal (http://ocw.mit.edu/highschool/). For this portal, MIT has mined the OCW site for all of the materials applicable to advanced high school study, and organized them so students and teachers can easily access content related to AP physics, calculus, and biology. "Highlights" is just one example of the ways the wealth of OCW materials can be tailored to meet very specific challenges.

The cost of free

MIT OpenCourseWare is a remarkably efficient way of generating educational benefit on a global scale, but providing educational materials to the world at no cost — however beneficial — is not without cost. The OpenCourseWare Web site is not simply a public version of MIT’s teaching systems. It is a separate, highly enhanced and expanded publication of course materials specifically prepared for open sharing.

Enormous effort goes into collecting the materials from faculty, reformatting them to maximize accessibility, organizing them into consistent structures, and clearing any copyright hurdles. On average, each course MIT publishes costs about $10,000.

In addition, MIT pays for global distribution through a high-capacity network, and distributes mirror copies of the site to universities in bandwidth-constrained regions. MIT also collaborates with the hundreds of other universities sharing their own content through the OpenCourseWare Consortium (http://ocwconsortium.org). For MIT OpenCourseWare to continue to publish 200 courses each year, and provide these distribution and outreach services, the annual budget is $4 million.

MIT cannot support this alone. The Institute has already invested millions in OCW, and continues to provide significant support to the program. But it needs the help of individuals and organizations who share the deeply held conviction that unlocking knowledge makes the world a better place.

For individuals seeking to make a major charitable contribution, OCW represents an opportunity to impact the lives of millions through a proven and cost-effective program. Your monetary gift or designation of stock—for core support or endowment—will generate a legacy of global educational benefit for years to come.