CHARLES VEST: Thank you all for joining us here today.
As president of MIT, I've come to expect
top-level, innovative, and intellectually entrepreneurial
ideas from the MIT community.
When we established several months ago the Council
on Educational Technology at MIT,
we charged a subgroup with coming up
with a project that would reach beyond the boundaries
of our campus, beyond our classrooms.
And I have to tell you that we went
into this expecting that something creative
and cutting edge and challenging would emerge,
something that would be consistent with MIT'S mission.
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But frankly, I assumed, and I think
most people assumed, that it would also
be something that would be based on a revenue producing model,
project, or program that would somehow
take into account the power of the internet
and its potential for new applications in education.
But I must admit that OpenCourseWare is not
exactly what I had expected.
And it's not what anybody else expected, either.
But it is very typical of our faculty
to come up with something truly creative and different.
Let me explain it.
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PROFESSOR: How's everyone doing?
CLASS: Wonderful!
PROFESSOR: Come on, let's do better than that.
How is everyone doing?
CLASS: Wonderful!
PROFESSOR: Thank you.
CURT NEWTON: So MIT OpenCourseWare
is a free sharing of the materials
from the MIT classroom, primarily,
with the whole world.
It's a permanent collection and archive of those materials
that people can use at any time they see fit.
So it's set up for self-paced learning,
for people to download, remix, reuse
the materials for whatever projects that they
happen to be getting into.
KRISHNA RAJAGOPAL: OCW is this remarkable incarnation
of the values of MIT, MIT sense of mission,
MIT sense of purpose.
This sense of openness and sharing of how we teach.
PRESENTER: Welcome to MIT 6S191.
KRISHNA RAJAGOPAL: Goes back much longer than 20 years,
if you go back to the founding with William Barton Rogers.
All through the 1870s and 1880s, he
traveled by train up and down the Eastern seaboard,
helping other universities figure out
how to teach with mind and hand the way MIT does.
Come to the '60s, a group of MIT faculty
shared the physics curriculum, called PSSC, broadly all
around the world with the technologies of the '60s.
JOHN KING: We now have two ideas about light, waves
and particles.
Which is right?
KRISHNA RAJAGOPAL: And what pioneers
like Chuck Vest and Hal Ableson and Dick Yue and Steve Lerman,
what they all realized in the early 2000s
was that we could now do this on a grand scale.
2,500 courses, that was their vision.
And it's been realized.
It's made an amazing impact on literally millions of lives.
And it's something that MIT is very, very proud of.
GILBERT STRANG: Well, for me, everything about OpenCourseWare
has been good.
Teaching at MIT is a wonderful job.
But to have it go outside MIT, much farther than MIT,
is extra special.
They all lie on a straight line.
This is a linear equation--
Well, thinking about 20 years ago,
the idea of doing video lectures was somehow in the air.
So I just welcome that chance to show what linear algebra, what
the subject was doing.
And at the same time it was showing what MIT is doing
and what OpenCourseWare could offer.
It's such a positive thing for education, to be free,
and to be open, and to be worldwide.
AHMED ELMAGBRI: I think for all of this,
we're finding a good education is hardly possible.
During three years of civil war, all universities
were closed in my city.
And OCW was the place to get my education from.
Because of this knowledge that I gained,
I participated in building a prosthetic hand to help
the war-affected people.
And I am now a student of an elite master's program
at one of the top-rated universities in Europe
as the first Libyan student to be represented.
CURT NEWTON: At this point, OpenCourseWare
has delivered well more than a billion minutes
of learning on its website.
And the growth of our YouTube channel,
which has 2.85 million subscribers,
is the largest subscription base for any dot edu on YouTube,
which I think is a testament to the global interest
in learning.
KRISHNA RAJAGOPAL: And to me, what's also remarkable
is that OpenCourseWare was the first of its kind,
but much has followed it and is today
the foundation of a much broader,
open educational resources ecosystem of different people
in different educational institutions,
producing and sharing and repurposing and reusing
materials that are available to everyone on Earth.
And at present, we at MIT are in the middle of building,
designing a new platform that will take MIT
into its second 20 years.
At the time it was founded, President Vest
said this idea to him was a surprise.
It's not a surprise anymore.
It's baked into the fabric of MIT.
OCW is just, it's a part of what we do.
CHARLES VEST: OpenCourseWare may seem a bit counterintuitive
in a market-driven world, but it really
is consistent with what I believe
is the very best in MIT.
It's great service orientation.
It's innovative.
It expresses our belief in the way
that education can be advanced by constantly widening access
to knowledge and information and by inspiring others
to participate.
Simply put, OpenCourseWare is a natural marriage
of American higher education and the capabilities
of the World Wide Web.