From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 26, 2001.
MIT Begins Effort to Create Public Web Pages for More Than 2,000
Courses
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has begun the pilot phase of
its closely watched plan to create detailed Web pages for nearly all of
its courses and develop courseware tools that other institutions could
use free.
In the process, officials at MIT are finding that professors' skill
levels vary dramatically when it comes to using the Web in their courses
-- which could make it difficult to create a system that is flexible
enough to meet everyone's needs.
Last month, MIT began working with about 20 professors from eight
departments to create prototype course Web pages that will lay the
groundwork for its OpenCourseWare project. The project, which is
expected to cost as much as $100-million over 10 years, aims to publish
Web pages for more than 2,000 courses. To meet that goal, MIT is hiring
a support staff and trying to develop templates and search tools that
will make it easy for Web users to look in on the institute's courses.
MIT's plans for the project have sparked widespread interest at other
institutions, and many see it as an important statement that course
materials should be thought of not as commercial products but as
scholarly publications, readily available for review and reuse by
interested peers.
What has most surprised the project's leaders so far is the range of Web
savvy among professors.
"We have faculty with enormously elaborate Web sites that are truly
state-of-the-art, and we have faculty with nothing -- with paper notes
that they give out," says Steven R. Lerman, a professor of civil and
environmental engineering who is leading the project during the pilot
phase. "The biggest challenge to OpenCourseWare is, How do you tailor
supporting the faculty when they're all starting at very different
places in the technological spectrum?"
Among the goals of the pilot phase of the project, which will last
through March, are finding out what professors want from course Web
pages and creating a process for supporting and maintaining the pages.
So far, the project is focused on creating interactive features for the
Web pages that will serve professors and students on the campus, rather
than on designing the interface that will allow people outside the
university to make use of course materials, says Kyung I. Han, a
consultant who is a manager of the pilot project. "As we move forward,
then we'll tackle the off-campus users, and that will be an interesting
challenge."
The university has emphasized that its course Web sites are not
distance-education offerings, but simply an educational resource. Only
students enrolled in MIT courses will be able to use the interactive
features of the Web sites.
Mr. Han says that his team is also trying to develop ways to deal with
professors' concerns about intellectual-property issues. Some professors
worry that placing materials on public Web sites might hurt their
chances of publishing or selling their work in other forms, such as in
textbooks or software.
"We want to have a base set of policies that we're going to abide by
going forward," says Mr. Han.
Professors will not be required to create course Web pages, but project
leaders are hoping for strong participation. So far there has been more
interest than the project can handle. When officials asked departments
to volunteer for the pilot phase, 15 stepped forward, says Mr. Lerman.
Only about half of those departments were chosen.
Mr. Lerman says that he's also seen plenty of enthusiasm for the project
from universities in other countries. Although MIT plans to make its
course materials available only in English, outside groups have already
expressed interest in translating some of the materials into Portuguese,
Spanish, and Mandarin. "And we expect that many other places will be
interested in translating OpenCourseWare materials," he says.
For now, however, Mr. Lerman says his highest priority for the project
is hiring an executive director, whom he hopes to have in place by
January. Many of the decisions about the details of the project and
hiring of additional staff members are being left for the executive
director to make, he adds.
MIT plans to have Web pages for 100 courses available by next fall, and
for 500 courses by September 2003.