ShareThisBy ELEANOR CHUTE
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Monday, November 19, 2007
You may not have the grades, the money or even the means to get to a physics class with one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's best lecturers.
But if you have an Internet connection anywhere in the world, you can watch a video of the Dutch-born physics professor, Walter Lewin, swinging on a cable across the front of a lecture hall in his Classical Mechanics course to demonstrate that weight doesn't affect the time it takes a pendulum to complete a cycle of motion.
And you can do this for free.
Six years ago, MIT began breaking down the knowledge barrier by announcing it would make materials from its courses available free on the Internet.
Later this month, MIT will celebrate reaching its goal of having written portions, at least, of 1,800 courses -- virtually the entire course catalog, including materials from about 90 percent of its professors -- available free on its Web site.
"MIT used to be an ivory tower, like the Forbidden City in China," said Lewin. Now, he said, the public can see inside. "I think it's a wonderful thing. They get, by and large, very high quality stuff."
MIT's initiative has ignited a trend that has made course materials from universities around the world available for free on school Web sites or on consortium sites like YouTube and iTunes U, a service of Apple Computer.
The materials are known as "open courseware" or, more broadly, "open educational resources."
MIT's initial vision was that the courses would be viewed by other university instructors in hopes of improving teaching worldwide. But only 16 percent of users are educators. Nearly a third are students from other schools, and about half are self-learners.
"It came as a surprise to us there are so many self-learners out there. It wasn't intended to be distance learning," said Steve Carson, external relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare
Of the students, about 44 percent say they use it to complement a course they're already taking, while others say they are enhancing their personal knowledge or planning what they'd like to take.
Self-learner Rogelio Morales, 34, of Caracas, Venezuela, has been using the MIT site for more than two years and has tried five courses, including vision science, the design of ocean systems and the brain and cognitive sciences.
Morales is a metallurgical engineer and commercial diver who does underwater inspections.
From his MIT open-courseware experience, he became involved in research and has presented that research at conferences. Now, he has an invitation from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts to participate in a three-month guest-student program in underwater imaging.
While using open courseware is free, making it is not.
MIT spends $4 million a year on it.
Efforts are being made to decrease the cost of providing the materials, including using free software developed at Utah State University to make the process of posting the materials easier.
"If we don't crack the sustainability nut, we'll be yesterday's fad," said John Dehlin, director of the Open Courseware Consortium, a collaboration of more than 100 schools in 20-plus countries.
However, open courseware doesn't appear to be a fading fad.
College professors already routinely share research at conferences, in professional journals and through collaborations.
Now their teaching also can be displayed in open courseware.
"It allows a certain level of peer review we always had in the research area, but for the most part, it was in the closet in the teaching area," said Candace Thille, director of Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative.
Information, too, is becoming more available.
"It's transforming the culture of who owns knowledge. It's unlocking knowledge previously held in universities," said Cathy Casserly, program officer for education for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has given $80 million over six years to various open-educational resources efforts, including those at MIT and CMU.
Younger people are particularly attuned to the notion, said Dehlin.
"This idea of sharing the learning is something that resonates with this new generation of YouTube and iPod and blogcasts and wikis. Openness is becoming the ethic of the rising generation," he said.
The idea of sharing course materials over the Internet isn't new -- the University of California-Berkeley, for example, has tried various forms of sharing for a dozen years.
However, shared course materials are becoming more numerous and more accessible. Some of Berkeley's lectures now appear on YouTube and iTunes U.
"I receive letters from people who never thought they could get a college education this way. It's the finest thing that could happen in the field of learning," said Berkeley professor Marian Diamond, 81, who has taught for 60 years.
Some have watched the videos of her integrative biology course so closely that they remarked on how the noted brain researcher pulls a human brain out of a flowered hatbox.
But as MIT's OpenCourseWare Web site notes, "OCW is not an MIT education."
Universities do not provide free credit, degrees or certificates for open-courseware work.
Exactly what is available varies widely not only among schools but within them.
Some of the courses are not the latest offered. Users typically don't get feedback from a professor, interaction with classmates or graded tests and assignments. However, some professors, including Lewin, do return e-mails, and, for some courses, outside Internet discussion boards are in early stages of development.
(Eleanor Chute can be reached at echute(at)post-gazette.com)
