[nettime-lat] RV: [media-news] MIT Classes For Free On Web

["pedro lopez casuso" <pedropez@cantv.net>]

a todos los interesados
en la  informacion libre
y en la educacion on-line

...pez
--


----------
De: George Antunes <antunes@pdq.net>
Para: media-news@yahoogroups.com
Asunto: [media-news] MIT Classes For Free On Web
Fecha: miér., 4 abri 2001 10:40 am


[No grade, no fee, no course credit. This is great opportunity for those
just interested in the content. You can be any age. You can be at any
location that has Net access. You don't need to meet admission requirements
or show that you have taken specific prerequisite courses. This outreach
program at MIT will change lives around the world.]

April 4, 2001

Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free
By CAREY GOLDBERG
NY Times


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."


=======================================================
George Antunes                 Voice: 713-743-3923
Political Science Dept        Fax:   713-743-3927
University of Houston          Internet: antunes@uh.edu
Houston, TX 77204             or       antunes@pdq.net



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