From the issue dated December 6, 2002
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MIT's Open WindowPutting course materials online, the university faces high expectationsBy FLORENCE OLSEN The lecture notes for a software-engineering course were the draw for David Mitchell,
The course is an introduction to software architecture and design for computer programmers. On MIT's campus, undergraduates finish it in one semester, but Mr. Mitchell's study group will take more than a year because it plans to meet only once a month. The programmer, who works for Sprint, is afraid that a more-aggressive pace would not work "with the other things that are going on in people's lives." Mr. Mitchell heads the education committee of the Greater Kansas City Java Professionals Association, so he has had some experience with study groups. Even though the software-engineering lab's materials are intended for classroom teaching, Mr. Mitchell says, he likes them because they will give him and his fellow programmers opportunities to practice expressing their thoughts on program design. After all, he says, "computer people" are not always comfortable with public speaking. "This is really a chance to practice that skill without being under pressure at work." Some educators think that MIT's OpenCourseWare project (http://www.ocw.mit.edu) holds great promise for motivated learners like Mr. Mitchell and his colleagues. MIT officials say the project's purpose is to expand access to educational materials, making them free and without restriction for noncommercial use. And by declaring its intention to publish the outlines, lecture notes, assignments, and reading lists for the 2,000 courses that MIT offers, the institute is providing what others say is a new model for education. MIT's project "is an excellent example of how a leading private university can practice what we call intellectual philanthropy in the world of teaching," says Toru Iiyoshi, a director of the Knowledge Media Laboratory at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Jeff Cooper, for one, thinks that what MIT is doing with OpenCourseWare will revolutionize education. Mr. Cooper, who describes himself as "a lowly tech-ed guy" at Pacific University, in Oregon, says that he envisions a future in which professors and students, using free course materials like MIT's and open-classroom sites on the Web like Tapped In, will exchange their teaching services through a kind of online barter system. "I could volunteer my hours [to teach] at the high-school level and that would give me credit to then get other hours from somebody else," says Mr. Cooper, an education-technology specialist at Pacific. Proponents of the OpenCourseWare project say that it will give interested foreign students and faculty members a glimpse of the MIT curriculum. At a Unesco forum about the project in Paris in July, Alain Senteni, director of the Virtual Center for Innovative Learning Technologies, at the University of Mauritius, said his institution had an interest in translating and adapting the content of MIT courses for French-speaking developing countries. And Mohammed Dahbi, a professor at Mohammed V University's Agdal campus, in Morocco, said faculty members and administrators might use OpenCourseWare as a model for course structure and pedagogy when they recast their courses during the next few years. University courses, he said, are being rewritten as part of a broad reform movement in Morocco. Questions Remain MIT's plans are generating interest worldwide, but some say that the project is too ambitious, even for MIT. OpenCourseWare materials for only 38 out of the more than 2,000 courses at MIT have been published so far. MIT expects to finish the project in September 2007, but some big questions remain: How much will it all cost? And what kind of organization will be needed to accomplish it? Who will take advantage of the course materials? And how does the mission of a top university change when it offers its teaching methods to the world? If nothing else, the OpenCourseWare project will demonstrate what it takes to bring a university's entire curriculum of course materials into the digital age, says Anne H. Margulies, the project's executive director. "Even though this is not going to be easy for us to do, it's going to be extremely worthwhile." Already, there have been surprises. Collecting permissions, paying royalties, and finding other materials to substitute for copyrighted materials have turned out to be much bigger jobs than expected. "It may not be such a big problem for people teaching physics, math, and chemistry, who tend to use text readers. But it's a very big problem for people in the social sciences and humanities and the arts, who tend to have a much more eclectic syllabus," says Stephen M. Meyer, a professor of political science who is chairman of the MIT faculty committee on curriculums. Another challenge for the OpenCourseWare project, Ms. Margulies says, will be measuring its impact, insofar as it is possible to find out who is using the course materials and how they are using them. The preliminary Web site, which went up in September, had more than 315,000 unique visitors in less than a month. By analyzing traffic statistics for the Web site, MIT officials know that at least 30 percent of those were international visitors. Developing more-sophisticated methods for measuring the use of OpenCourseWare will be part of the project. The Evolution of the Idea Charles M. Vest, MIT's president, says he has no doubt about the value of OpenCourseWare. He readily endorsed, promoted, and sought financing for it after a committee of faculty members and administrators originally proposed it two years ago. "It expresses our belief in the way education can be advanced -- by constantly widening access to information," he said at a news conference last April. MIT made its decision on OpenCourseWare only after a study conducted in 2000 by Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting company, found that there was no market for selling MIT courses online. The study also looked at whether MIT faculty members could "reconceptualize" their courses for a broader audience. Most faculty members said they could not. Ann J. Wolpert, who directs MIT's libraries and served on the committee that worked with the Booz Allen consultants, says MIT professors "are really good at teaching the kind of student who is admitted to MIT," and may not be as good at teaching others. After the consultants' report, MIT was faced with a choice. It could do nothing to reach a broader audience on the Web, or it could publish its course materials there for professors and students anywhere to copy and adapt for their own use. MIT, whose strong ties to industry are well known, charges many businesses fees in exchange for access to the ideas of MIT faculty members. Some faculty members believe that MIT is also obligated to make knowledge freely available in the world and to champion the idea that knowledge "is more than just a commodity," says Mr. Meyer, the political-science professor. Still, MIT has frequently had to correct the public perception that, with OpenCourseWare, it would offer free online courses from MIT professors for credit. "Because it was such a new idea, it was bound to be misunderstood by some," says Ms. Margulies, the project director. What is not new, faculty members say, is professors' practice of borrowing from one another as they put together their own courses. OpenCourseWare promotes these exchanges, but on an institutional scale. In that respect, the project's greatest impact may be in countries overseas, especially where universities are still developing their curriculums, says Ira H. Fuchs, vice president for research in information technology for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which helped finance OpenCourseWare. A Ripple Effect? Some MIT officials hope the project might have a ripple effect, prompting other institutions to adopt similar standards and make their course materials public and searchable online. "I think everybody's watching to see how this turns out," Mr. Fuchs says. OpenCourseWare is one of several high-profile technology projects that have made MIT a place to watch. There is also the Open Knowledge Initiative, a collaborative effort led by MIT and Stanford University. The two institutions, along with six others, are developing free and open technical specifications for the components of learning-management systems and related infrastructure, such as the user directories for computer networks. Learning-management systems are Web-based software programs that many colleges use internally to provide online versions of class rosters, course outlines, assignments, discussions, quizzes, and grade books. And, supported by a $1.8-million grant from the Hewlett-Packard Company, there is DSpace, an electronic archive for preserving the digital works of MIT faculty members. DSpace will be used within MIT for the long-term safekeeping of older versions of professors' course materials with their embedded links. The archive will also serve as an electronic filing cabinet for course components created by MIT professors. "As faculty members assemble a course in a particular semester, they can sort through the simulations and tools and syllabi that are deposited in DSpace, pick the ones that they want -- whether they are their own or a colleague's -- and use them in their own course, if they so desire," says Ms. Wolpert, the libraries' director. If there are any hidden dangers in MIT's OpenCourseWare plans, one might be that hopes are too high, and some people are bound to be disappointed. "After the original announcement last April, expectations seemed to be off the charts," Ms. Margulies recalls. "People thought we were going to publish 2,000 courses overnight." Everyone familiar with the project agrees that participation by most of MIT's 1,000 faculty members is critical to its success. Although no formal survey was taken to gauge professors' interest, many of them have expressed enthusiasm for the project. However, their involvement is entirely voluntary, and professors will not participate if it takes too much of their time, says Shigeru Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics and of Japanese language and culture at MIT. "We know their effort won't be zero, no matter what we do," Ms. Margulies says of faculty members. "So we need to be quite honest with them about what that level of effort might be. We're trying to come up with our best estimate of that now." Only about 60 percent of the 2,000 courses taught at MIT have some materials online already, she says. Gilbert Strang, a professor of mathematics, is typical of the faculty members who already have their courses on the OpenCourseWare site. Several semesters before the OpenCourseWare project began, Mr. Strang and several student assistants hand-coded a variety of course materials to put online for Mr. Strang's own students -- assignments, lecture notes, and a semester's worth of video clips from his lectures on linear algebra. "There is always somebody in the class who prefers lectures at midnight instead of noon," he says. Faculty members participating in the OpenCourseWare project sign a licensing agreement that lets MIT distribute their course materials on the OpenCourseWare Web site, but the faculty members retain the copyright to the materials. Time and Money Like MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Princeton Universities are involved in experiments to make course materials public on the Web. But it is too soon to tell whether such projects may start up elsewhere. Other universities and faculty members might hesitate to make all of their course materials publicly available, fearing that if a course were "lousy in some way," it would expose a faculty member as incompetent, says Steven W. Gilbert, president of the TLT Group, a nonprofit teaching, learning, and technology corporation in Washington. And some people might be concerned that course materials, once they were made public, would be used to evaluate professors in some way "not consistent with their expectations when they agreed to put the materials up," Mr. Gilbert says. Neither situation is very likely to occur at MIT, he adds. More people are looking at the estimated cost of OpenCourseWare and realizing that their institutions could never afford such spending. So far, MIT has received $11-million -- $5.5-million each from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation -- to cover the first 27 months of the project. The project also will get $1-million a year for the next two years from MIT's own budget. Early estimates put the total cost for the seven-year project at nearly $100-million, but newer estimates are expected to be lower. Project administrators are revising them "based on our experience to date," says Ms. Margulies. The project is still at an early stage. For professors who are starting from scratch to put course materials online, the OpenCourseWare group has begun scanning lecture notes and coding them using standard hypertext markup language. But the group is evaluating content-management systems that would automatically convert course materials to the proper format. MIT also plans to add descriptive "metadata" tags to the published course materials, Ms. Margulies says, so that the various parts -- recommended readings, old quizzes, problem sets, lecture notes -- can be easily located and copied, without having to look over all of the materials for the course. "We're hoping that we'll find some flexible and creative publishers who will try some experiments with us," which perhaps will lead to fewer restrictions on what can be published in OpenCourseWare, she adds. Delays in getting copyright clearances were the main reason that the OpenCourseWare site started up in September with 38 courses instead of the 100 that MIT had planned to release, she says. As colleges get more involved in online publishing, they usually try to minimize the number as well as the expense of third-party copyright fees, says Gary E. Miller, associate vice president of distance education at Pennsylvania State University and executive director of its World Campus. A course that depends heavily on third-party copyrighted materials becomes much more complicated to maintain over time, he says. Many believe that MIT's technical-course materials are the most likely to create interest in OpenCourseWare. But even so, Daniel Jackson, who teaches "Laboratory in Software Engineering," says he was surprised and delighted when he heard that a study group was forming in Kansas City around his materials. "We haven't yet begun to understand the many different ways that something like this might be used," says Mr. Jackson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science. "And that sounds like a wonderful one. Good for them." Mr. Mitchell, the professional programmer who identifies himself as "the enthusiastic leader" of the study group, says the course material is clearly geared toward an elite set of students. Even for the kind of student for whom the course is intended -- a top-notch undergraduate who is a quick study -- the course moves at what Mr. Mitchell calls "an aggressive pace." He and his programmer colleagues will move slower, he says, and he'll be pleased if five or six others stick with the course to the end. Even so, he's eager to delve into the lecture notes and quizzes, which, he says, "really bring the material into focus." "When I was reading this material," says Mr. Mitchell, "it says, 'This is an introductory course in design. It's not a course about Java, but we're going to be using Java. You need to know how to program in Java by the third lesson.' And I was like, Wow." INSIDE ONE MIT COURSE-MATERIALS OFFERING One of the courses included in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare site (http://www.ocw.mit.edu) is "Laboratory in Software Engineering," an introduction to software architecture and design for computer programmers. The site includes a wide array of materials from the course:
2 OTHER PROJECTS THAT SHARE COURSE MATERIALS The OpenCourseWare effort of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is aimed at making freely available on the Web the course materials for MIT's entire curriculum. Two other projects in academe also help students and faculty members locate college-course materials on the Web: World Lecture Hall (http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture) Created by: University of Texas at Austin, Center for Instructional Technologies Size: Course materials for 1,550 courses from colleges where professors have submitted them for inclusion in a database Comment: "We like to share everything, and all that we ask is that people credit the source." -- Susanna Herndon, interim director of the Center for Instructional Technologies Syllabus Finder (http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi) Created by: George Mason University, Center for History and New Media Size: Course materials for 100,000 courses from college Web sites. A customized Google-based search engine has located and retrieved them; 39,000 out of 100,000 are cached on GMU servers. Comment: "We should be in the business of having people steal our stuff, because we're trying to foster innovation, exchange, communication, and dialogue. -- Roy Rosenzweig, director of the Center for History and New Media
SOURCE: Chronicle reporting
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 49, Issue 15, Page A31
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education