The September issue of Wired Magazine has a story on MIT's OpenCourseWare project. Until August 26, you'll have to read it in the print magazine. After that it will be freely available on the magazine's web site. Excerpt: "When MIT announced to the world in April 2001 that it would be posting the content of some 2,000 classes on the Web, it hoped the program --dubbed OpenCourseWare-- would spur a worldwide movement among educators to share knowledge and improve teaching methods. No institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary, or as daunting. MIT would make everything, from video lectures and class notes to tests and course outlines, available to any joker with a browser. The academic world was shocked by MIT's audacity --and skeptical of the experiment. At a time when most enterprises were racing to profit from the Internet and universities were peddling every conceivable variant of distance learning, here was the pinnacle of technology and science education ready to give it away. Not the degrees, which cost about $41,000 a year, but the content. No registration required."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/12/2003 02:21:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
