Open sharing of knowledge and informations
Four years after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled a plan to make all its course materials available online for all the world to use, Anne H. Margulies still gets asked one question more than any other: âWhy would MIT give this all away?â?
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MIT has put nearly 1,000 of its 1,800 courses online, and is on track to finish the work of building the site by 2008 at a cost of $35 million. (The university is just beginning the work of estimating the costs of sustaining the OpenCourseWare project in a âsteady stateâ? once the buildout is finished, but expects, once the foundation money dries up, to absorb most of the annual costs in as its regular budget.) The site gets about 400,000 unique visits each month, or about 20,000 a day.
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It has also helped encourage dozens of other colleges in the United States and worldwide to join what Margulies calls âthis new movement toward open sharing of knowledge and information.â? Major efforts are under way at Utah State University, Foothill-DeAnza Community College District and Carnegie Mellon University, among others.
Read the full article at Inside Higher ED and do not forget to visit the OpenCourseware portal of MIT
