lug-bg: Eto tova e "Open Source"

[sn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Svetoslav Nikolov)]

Tova e edna malka iniciativa ot horata v MIT.

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April 4, 2001

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

By CAREY GOLDBERG

    CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 3 - 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 investing tens 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.

A software entrepreneur in Washington, D.C., Michael Saylor, pledged
$100 million to create an online free university a year ago, but he
would build it from scratch, and the value of his stock has
plummeted. M.I.T.'s plan differs from Mr. Saylor's, President Vest
said: "For one thing, it's going to happen."

Another difference between the M.I.T. plan and other Internet
initiatives is that it makes no effort to offer full-fledged,
for-credit courses online. Rather, it will offer course materials as
ingredients of learning that can then be combined with teacher-student
interaction somewhere else - or simply explored by, say, professors in
Chile or precocious high school students in Bangladesh.

Still, is the institute worried that M.I.T. students will balk at
paying about $26,000 a year in tuition when they can get all their
materials online?

"Absolutely not," Dr. Vest said. "Our central value is people and the
human experience of faculty working with students in classrooms and
laboratories, and students learning from each other, and the kind of
intensive environment we create in our residential university."

"I don't think we are giving away the direct value, by any means, that
we give to students," he said. "But I think we will help other
institutions around the world."

Most of the 940 or so faculty members support the plan, Professor
Lerman and others said, but some have reservations. Some argued that
the institute would be giving away a valuable asset that could be used
to subsidize the residential students. (The question of whether
university knowledge can be turned into online gold remains a big one,
however; most firms that are trying it, Dr. Vest said, have
encountered "much rougher sailing" than expected.)

Other faculty skeptics questioned whether it would be a good use of
professors' time to labor over Web sites, and still others have
questioned whether sub-par Web sites might not end up reflecting badly
on M.I.T.

Then there is the question of intellectual property, already a thorny
one in academia as the promise of Internet riches exacerbates the
question of who owns the electronic rights to a professor's lectures
and research. Some professors, Mr. Lerman said, may end up having two
Web sites: one for internal use with, say, large portions of a
soon-to-be- published textbook, and one for external use.

But he and others said that issues of intellectual property had
surfaced little in the months of faculty discussion of the
initiative. Rather, they said, a willingness, even an eagerness, to
share appeared to dominate.

"This is a natural fit to what the Web is really all about," Dr. Vest
said. "We've learned this lesson over and over again. You can't have
tight, closed-up systems. We've tried to open up software
infrastructure in a variety of ways and that's what unleashed the
creativity of software developers; I think the same thing can happen
in education."

In fact, M.I.T. is a hotbed of the "open source" software movement;
and this new Internet initiative is based on a similar idea, said Hal
Abelson, a professor of computer science and engineering who is
involved in both.

"Fundamentally, they proceed from the same ethic, which has to do with
sharing," Professor Abelson said. "In the Middle Ages people built
cathedrals, where the whole town would get together and make a thing
that's greater than any individual person could do and the society
would kind of revel in that. We don't do that as much anymore, but in
a sense this is kind of like building a cathedral."

The initiative is to begin with a two-year pilot program to put
materials from more than 500 courses on the Web, work to be done by a
combination of professional staff and teaching assistants. One of the
advantages of the initiative, M.I.T. officials said, will be that it
will unite all the posted courses in one electronic place, allowing
students to see how they flow into each other, to search the whole
repository and to jump from one to the next when they cross- reference
each other.

Professor Abelson and others estimated that at most 20 percent of
professors already have substantive Web sites for their courses.

University officials said they were not worried that, with extensive
course materials posted online, students would be less likely to come
to class. In fact, the university's provost, Robert A. Brown, said,
when course materials are already posted, "it pushes the faculty in
the direction of `How do I best use the contact hours so that people
learn?'  which is clearly critical."

Over all, the vision for 10 years from now, Provost Brown said, was "a
world in which you'll find students able to search what will be huge
repositories of content" and "they'll be able to use content from many
places educationally, and we'll be using other people's as much as
they'll be using ours."

Dr. Vest said he did not rule out the possibility that M.I.T. might
seek to develop profit-oriented Web programs in the future. But as for
this initiative, he said, he suspected its greatest impact might come
overseas, among institutions that cannot attract world-class faculty.

"I also suspect," he said, "in this country and throughout the world,
a lot of really bright, precocious high school students will find this
a great playground." And ultimately, he said, "there will probably be
a lot of uses that will really surprise us and that we can't really
predict."


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 Svetoslav Nikolov
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