Summary Notes on "OpenCourseWare: A Case Study in Institutional Decision Making," by S. R. Lerman and S. Miyagawa, Academe, Bulletin of the AAUP, September-October 2002, pp. 23-27.
Summarized by J. T. P. Yao, 9/19/02
"On April 4, 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a major new initiative called MIT OpenCourseWare. The concept behind OpenCourseWare, known as OCW, is deceptively simple: MIT will create Web sites for all of the courses it teaches, which will be open and freely accessible to the world. OCW is very much a work in progress. Nevertheless, MIT's experience in planning and testing OCW has provided insight into how the program is likely to develop."
" The ways in which OCW differs from these scattered initiatives are in (a) the intent of MIT to systematically build Web sites for all of the courses it offers; (b) the plan for a central support organization that will help to produce the Web sites without requiring extraordinary efforts by individual professors; (c) the creation of a single, searchable organizing structure spanning all the courses; (d) MIT's commitment to the OCW Web site as an enduring feature of the university's operations; (e) a plan to provide a consistent, but not overly constraining, 'look' for the sites of the courses represented, and (f) the decision to allow free and open reuse of OCW materials for all nonprofit educational and research purposes. We see OCW as a way to express our faculty's views on the structure and organization of teaching."
"The initiative that led to OCW began with MIT's Council on Educational Technology (MITCET). MITCET's Web site <Web.mit.edu/cet> explains that the council 'provide strategic guidance and oversight of MIT efforts to develop an infrastructure and initiatives for the application of technology to education.' The team was to 'develop a recommendation to address how MIT can generate and offer [online educational] modules that provide the target market with a working understanding of current hot issues and emerging fields.' The roughly forty interviews conducted over four months revealed that a great deal of e-learning was already going on in various forms. The team saw the alumni as representative of the target audience: college graduates, many of whom are professionals. This market research resulted in several surprising findings. The team members then studied different combinations for generating the maximum revenue relative to the cost of production and administration. The external interviews, market research, and business scenarios cast doubt on the initial idea of a lifelong learning program that would generate net revenue."
" The team interviewed about sixty MIT faculty members who responded to an e-mail query asking about e-learning initiatives in which they were already involved. Two important lessons came out of these interviews. First, the team learned that the faculty respondents created online materials to improve the quality of their teaching. Second, with few exceptions, the faculty members received no monetary compensation for their work. "
" OCW is a surprisingly simple idea, but its significance would not have been apparent without the extensive research carried out to understand the e-learning landscape and its business realities. But making MIT course materials available online would send a strong message about the university's vision: in the era of the Internet economy, MIT values learning, including e-learning, over financial gain. The team estimated that it would take $85 million over ten years to produce online materials from all the courses MIT offered in 2000. "
" The support among faculty was strong, opening the way for the public announcement of OCW on April 4, 2001. In May, MIT recruited a full-time executive director to oversee the program. Choice about technology also must be made. It remains to be seen what mix of commercial and 'home grown' technologies might prove useful in developing a publishing workflow that is not only efficient but also responsive to faculty members' needs."
"It will be several years before we know whether the enormous promise will be realized. We hope that OCW can serve as a model for similar initiative at other universities around the world."
[Readers who are interested in this article are
encouraged to read the original paper in its entirety. Other summary notes on
faculty reward systems are available on the Internet at http://lohman.tamu.edu
under the heading "Summaries of Papers ..."]