Celebrating 20 Years of MIT OCW Event

Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Krishna Rajagopal, MIT's Dean for Digital Learning. And I'm here to welcome everyone to this joyous occasion as OpenCourseWare turns 20. Today, we celebrate OCW's first 20 years, and look ahead to the potential and the plans for OCW, and the entire ecosystem of open educational resources that OCW sits within, in its next 20. The mission of OCW since its founding was to unlock knowledge and empower minds by publishing materials from virtually all MIT courses, and extend the reach of those materials via the OER movement which OCW played a key role in seeding. Charles Vest, who is the president of MIT who launched OCW 20 years ago, spoke at that time about how surprising and audacious the vision of OCW that came to him from a founding group of MIT faculty members was. Put all of our materials on the internet, openly? This came as a big surprise to President Vest 20 years ago. One way to see how right the faculty were back then, those founding faculty, is to say that today, sharing our pedagogy, our perspective, our insights, openly via OCW is simply unquestioned at MIT. It's seen as just a part of what we do. It comes from who we are. Of course we do this. And the fact that so much has changed in 20 years is a sign that the founders, the pioneers, were as right as in fact, they were. So, jumping ahead today, let's look at OCW today. 2,500 courses on OCW. Material from 2,500 courses. From 1,700 MIT instructors. OCW is the largest .edu YouTube channel in the world, with 2.97 million subscribers. And over the history of that YouTube channel, more than 2 billion minutes of learning on that YouTube channel. And I'll remind you that OCW was founded long before YouTube. And the idea that OCW would include video in this way was something that came after the founding, it's more recent. And yet, here we are. What about the OCW website, which is where it all began? To date, 210 million visitors to the OCW website. And just time on the website itself, more than a billion minutes of learning. And really, untold billions, we don't know how many more billions, of minutes of learning that OCW has made possible, as people use the materials from the website. Download a problem set, learn by doing. As people share the materials from that website. As people teach their own students using the materials from that website. The learning that has resulted as a consequence of OCW is inestimable. And furthermore, the magic of OER is that these materials morph, and get reshaped, and shared, and ripple outwards in myriad ways, as educators and organizations within the OER world take them and make them their own. For all of this, we, and millions around the world, owe our thanks to so many. Let me first thank the founding generation, the faculty who were there at the beginning who had the-- created the vision of OCW, one of whom you'll be hearing from later today. I also want to thank 1,700 MIT faculty and instructors who have contributed, and continue to contribute, their insights from their teaching, the artifacts of their teaching, the products of their labors, what they've created as they teach on campus in MIT's classrooms. Next, I want to thank thousands and thousands of generous supporters who have made this all possible, including two key foundations, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, without whom none of this would have happened. I also want to thank key corporate supporters, of whom there are a number, including in particular Ab Initio and MathWorks, as well as major individual supporters, including people like MIT alum John Gruber, and thousands more. And some of the supporters, many of these supporters, in fact, are here with us today, all of whose generosity we gratefully acknowledge today as a part of this celebration. And last but far from least, I want to thank the devoted OCW team itself. 17 devoted people who make the magic of OCW happen. Their work, their continuing efforts, realizes MIT's sustained and ongoing institutional commitment to OCW, for which we're also grateful. For the institutional commitment to OCW, this wonderful incarnation of MIT's mission and values. If you look at the mission of MIT, you see creating, sharing, and preserving knowledge. OCW does that in spades. And then you see a phrase in the mission that says that MIT is committed to working with others, to bring knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges. As we look to the future, now, to the evolving place of OCW in the OER landscape, OER is the embodiment, for OCW, of working with others to bring knowledge to bear on the great challenges of the world. We see a path, as we look ahead, to going from the magnificent access that OCW has already created-- access to knowledge, access to learning, access to MIT's teaching. Going forward, we see a path from that access to greater equity. And the way to get from access to equity involves collaboration. Collaboration with educators and OER institutions, each of whom bring knowledge to people whom they know well, to people in widely varying contexts with widely varying starting points. This is a key part of our vision for the future. So we will return to the OCW of the future at the end of the hour, after hearing from a distinguished panel. But first, let's kick this birthday party off with a magnificent video that was produced by Joe McMaster and MIT Video Production. In creating OCW, MIT launched a quiet but profound educational revolution. It unleashed the global open-sharing movement, and helped pave the way for the worldwide phenomenon of open digital learning. What are two or three words to describe OpenCourseWare's impact? I would say knowledge and scale. Eye-opening. Enlightening. Choose your own adventure. A whole new world. Wow, 20 years of MIT's OpenCourseWare. It's just amazing to think about. We've had more than 200 million people come to OCW and learn from the materials that MIT is sharing. My initial introduction to OpenCourseWare was actually at Bunker Hill Community College. My linear algebra professor would give us these weekly quizzes. We told her it was hard, and she said, actually, this is an MIT quiz. And I was kind of blown away that I did some part of it. And when I inquired how she got the quiz, she said, oh, there's this thing called MIT OpenCourseWare. It imparted me with this confidence of oh, I can do this. I can survive an MIT course. And that drove me to say, maybe I can thrive at MIT. OCW was the pioneer. It opened everybody's eyes to the possibility of connecting to learners who are in different countries, and different situations, different ages. We are making MIT OCW available in universities and community libraries which do not have internet connection. It has encouraged me to learn, to find out about things, to understand and to apply. There is so much that can be achieved by just giving people complete, wide open access to this knowledge that they can use whenever, wherever. As much as they need, as little as they need. It takes this very kind of privileged and elite education that we make accessible to our students, and opens it up to a broader public. The very existence of MIT's OpenCourseWare is inspiring. It's a shining example for institutions of higher education around the world. I think there's also great value in showing the range of disciplines that are taught at MIT, and showing the fact that the humanities and social sciences are as much a strength of what MIT has to offer as the STEM disciplines. This course that I created is now part of the record, and is now something that someone else can build on. Everything is there, even the syllabus, even the instructions of the teacher's, thesis, assignments. OCW is, perhaps, one of the best things that has happened to education Worldwide. It's like being so unselfish. You're giving everything of what you have, and sharing it with the other people, especially in developing countries like the Philippines. OpenCourseWare quite literally changed my life. It gave me the education I needed when there wasn't another place to find it. You're giving people the tools that will allow them to achieve their potential. We have real problems in the world that need to be solved, and we need problem solvers from every area of the planet to work on these. We've created this powerful foundation of free access to knowledge, and together we'll keep growing it. We're creating better ways for learners and teachers to find and to use that OCW content. And we'll keep sharing that vibrant reflection of the teaching and creativity from MIT. As we think about equity, we think about collaborators, so that we can bring more people, starting from different starting points, coming in different ways, to the point that they can learn from OCW. Together, we're forging new paths where everyone's contributing to the world's growing knowledge. And we're all using and sharing that knowledge every day to solve the world's great challenges. I want OCW to attract people. So it's not just a neutral, if you want it come get it, I want OCW to be calling on people to educate themselves, to empower themselves, to build and to have the necessary tools to do what they think is important. And I'm hoping that, over time, this snowball from 20 years ago becomes an avalanche of intellectual exchange amongst humanity. All right, well that was deeply inspiring for me to watch every time I see it. And I'm really glad that we could share that with you. Next, we're going to have a live conversation with several people from the MIT community who've made this possible, continue to make it possible, and are leading us together into the future. My name is Curt Newton as Director of OpenCourseWare. I joined the team shortly after it launched in 2004, and I've been director for the last few years. And I'm happy to introduce now my four co-panelists, Hal Abelson, professor of Computer Science and Engineering, part of the original faculty team who conceived of OpenCourseWare. He was a very busy guy around 2000, 2001, also helping launch things like the Creative Commons, which we are so glad to be partners in this enterprise with. Mussie Demisse, current MIT undergrad who we were introduced to in that video. As we heard, transferred to MIT after studying computer science at Bunker Hill Community College, and we've been really glad to work with him this year on our advisory committee. Anjali Sastry, senior lecturer at Sloan School of Management and founder of MIT Sloan's GlobalHealth Lab, where she's been building collaborations engaging students around the world to improve healthcare in places like sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. And last but not least, Mike Short, Associate Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering. He started as a student at MIT right when OCW was launched. Completed his master's in 2005, completed a doctorate in 2010, and is now a professor of nuclear science and engineering. Has produced a number of courses on OCW, including the build-your-own Geiger counter short course, lots of inspiration out there. So I'd like to ask each of our panelists to take, maybe, another minute to introduce yourself a little more fully, and in particular maybe if you can share a reflection on what OCW has meant to you. And I'd like to start off with Hal, and then we'll move on to Mussie. OK Curt, thanks a lot. And, Krishna, thank you for that wonderful introduction. Today is a wonderful 20th anniversary, but actually it's a triple 20th anniversary. Because there are three initiatives that are interlinked, that all have to do with this notion of open sharing. OCW is, I think, the most revolutionary. But there's also Creative Commons, which says, how do we align this idea of sharing with the technicalities of US copyright law? And then there is DSpace in the MIT libraries, which is how do we take that same vision of sharing, not just MIT educational courses, but MIT research publications? These all sit together, they all join in supporting this idea of open sharing of knowledge and what is the right-- what's the appropriate stance for a great world leading university to take, in terms of benefiting humanity through its intellectual productions? These all build on the internet as a vision of sharing. And it's worth noting, we talk about vision. There were other initiatives 20 years ago that had the same vision. Almost none of them survive today. And so the three things that we're talking about are all there, are all productive, and are all improving humanity. We often talk about MIT as a wonderful vision. The reality is that visions at this place are a dime a dozen. What's important is that you carry through, and you make something that's actually implemented and sustainable. And when I think about what MIT started 20 years ago, the fact that we're still here, and still producing, unlike so many other initiatives, is something that makes me enormously proud of MIT. Thank you, Hal. Thank you for helping us get that kicked off. Mussie. All right. Me and OCW, I kind of wish I knew OCW much earlier. I'm originally from Ethiopia, and there were times where, being in kind of a low-resource area, the issue is not that you don't want to learn. It's not that you don't want to build your capabilities. But you really don't see the pathways and the roads that will allow you to get there. So, for me, what OCW really means is, it's an opportunity for me to accomplish the things that I want. It's a pathway. And it's not just for me, but it's for my brothers and sisters all over the world. Thank you. Thank you. Anjali. Great comments. I was thinking about my own youth, now long ago. And I would read books and get an escape to the rest of the world, from the novels and non-fiction books I read. And now, there's OCW. You can walk through another door, and find out all kinds of information that's presented in ways that allow you to make your own path through at the pace that works for you as an instructor or as a learner. I benefit a ton from teaching with OCW in my mind, because it encourages me to reflect, to be conscious about what I'm teaching. I now write all my syllabi, for instance, with links to open-source content, so that others can benefit from it and I can share freely. I love that it mirrors our commitment to a physically open campus. I also have gone to other universities where you have to always unlock every door, and it's pretty cool that MIT's so open. Not amid COVID, but soon we will be again. And finally, when I launched my global health work, I went to Kenya and met all kinds of folks. I was just learning about the discipline. And somebody I met very early on, just randomly on the street, said, I use a mirror site in Rwanda. Thank you, thank you MIT for sharing all this material. We use it all the time. I didn't even know. I didn't even know there were people all over the world who were feeling part of MIT. So that's pretty cool. Thank you Anjali. And Mike. Sure. Well, I'd like to say that I'm not just a contributor, but I was also a client of OCW. I started at MIT in 2001 as a first year, and for me it's-- I've watched OCW give back to the world, and even to MIT, in so many more dimensions than I could have imagined. As a first year, I was an example-based learner. And OpenCourseWare gave me the examples I needed to survive MIT, because without them, I'm not sure I would have been able to. I started off, grade-wise, kind of at the bottom of the pack, and once I found and used OCW, that changed. And now, as a faculty member, I've got the opportunity to travel all over the world, despite not moving an inch, in the past 20 years. I've been able to travel outwards, and look back inwards. And to echo something that was said before, the number of people around the world that use and are thankful for OCW is incredible. I had an IAE mission to the National University of Mongolia, and for many of their courses their syllabus is the OpenCourseWare syllabus. And to see ways that not just students learn, and they feel amazing when they conquer MIT problem sets of material, but how instructors reinterpret our material gives me inspiration to bring back, to make the courses at MIT better. Thank you. I'm so glad that we're all able to have this conversation together, and I'd like to invite everybody who's watching this session to please put your questions in the chats, and in the places where you can enter questions, and those will be fed back to us, and we'll definitely spend a few minutes at the end of the panel sharing thoughts on some of those questions. So I'd like to return and ask each of you a bit of a follow up question, if I could. Again, starting with Hal as part of our founding team, what was in the water in 2001? What do you think led to this flowering of openness at that time? What has it led to? So it's a little hard to remember what 2001 was like. This was sort of the first kind of explosion of enthusiasm around the internet. And Chuck Vest, president of MIT at that time, would go around talking, and alumni and other groups would say to him, there's this internet. What's MIT going to do about it? And there was this notion about, there's an enormous opportunity, but we didn't really know what it was. And then there was a whole study we took, first with McKinsey, and then with Booz Allen, trying to come up with something. And this revolutionary idea, that we should just open it up to the world, kind of emerged, was extremely counterintuitive, because where universities were, in those days by and large, was that their courses were going to be enormous gold mines. That they were going to sell to alumni and others, and we did a study at MIT and said, well, know, that's not really going to work for MIT. And then there was this enormous insight, I think Dick Yue had it when he was getting food out of the refrigerator at night, that said, why don't we just give it away? And the amazing thing is that the MIT administration took it seriously. And really put MIT's force behind it, and MIT's credibility behind it. And that's really how it happened. As I mentioned before, many of those other places, involving Stanford, and Princeton, and Columbia, and all that, don't exist anymore. The one exception is eCornell. And we had this very, very funny thing where MIT has been asked by some of those organizations to join. Remember that person who was running Fathom, which came out came out of Columbia, came by to MIT, trying to get MIT to join the commercial Fathom. And this was like the day before we were going to announce OpenCourseWare, and it was just kind of funny, it was kind of confidential, it was kind of funny, kind of sitting there and saying, oh, yeah, well, you know, about tomorrow, we're about to take all of this stuff, and revolutionize and make it free. But it's a little hard to appreciate the real fervent around the internet, and I think we'll say later, when we talk about the future, we're in the reflection of that period today, and it's something we should be thinking about very, very hard as we think about the climate today, as compared to the climate 20 years ago. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Let's come back to that, for sure. I'd like to ask Mussie, as a beneficiary of some of that openness, what would you like people to know about how open education is affecting students' lives today? What did you experience, and what do you see both at your community college colleagues, and here at MIT? So before-- OER is the solution to the problem of the cost of educational resources becoming a barrier to education. And that happens at different levels. There's the, I'm taking a course, I want to know more, I want to get a more in-depth knowledge, and I'm interested. That's one aspect that OCW really tackles directly. You can just go to the website, it's in an organized manner, which, in my personal experience, the internet usually isn't. It's just like, hey, here's bits and pieces of everything. The other aspect of it is, in order for classes to get accreditation and so on, professors in these community colleges are almost forced to have these textbooks that larger organizations can-- the larger institutions, educational institutions, use. So what, by MIT producing open educational resources like this, basically what it's saying is, it's putting its big name, its big powerful name, behind open educational resources, which really gives freedom back to instructors in these community colleges to kind of say, hey, there's this textbook, but MIT has kind of validated this, and we can kind of approach it. So, for me and my friends and all, the basic point is this. We're trying to get an education. And OCW is just an easier way. It just removes certain cost-based barriers. Yeah. That cost foundation has become such a core issue in the open education resources movement. We hear that, Mussie, a lot. Anjali, in your experience trying to work globally, I'm curious how you see open knowledge sharing playing out and helping people build, achieve, solutions more rapidly, more effectively, and to what extent is the free-ness and the openness of it making that happen? So almost 15 years ago, when I started working in global health, I realized this is a domain in which we are, by definition, neophytes. MIT doesn't have a medical school or school of public health. So I already had to collaborate in order to just get the course going, I set up collaborations with Harvard Medical School, clinicians all over the world that I could find, who would serve as guides, as partners, help me source and develop projects. But the minute I started doing that, I realized I need to share. So I am relying on others to share with me, I need to share. So there was a really nice fit with OCW, It's interesting, because you think of online, I don't know, short videos being very kind of procedural or instructional, but OCW can handle a lot of complexity, too. And I've really been wrestling over these years with how best to present and frame that complexity. So I guess there's two themes in my answer. One is I think we all rely on many others to fuel our learning, and being conscious of that when you share what you've developed is, I think, just a really good way to keep you honest about the role of expertise from all over the place. And it also allows me to honor everybody's contributions, because I can record and share in OCW. And third, by kind of archiving and building on work year-to-year, it's really good for me as an instructor, for my students over the years, to be able to see, how has our thinking evolved? And I'll say to students, we're going to be archiving this. And we put student work up. So we disguise it, we get their permission, we remove any proprietary or confidential information, but because we share every year, we can generate an amazing dialogue, not only with potential students like Mussie, but also with alums and with potential partners. We get to show our work in a new way, which I think is really cool. Yeah. Yeah. I think this theme of opening up the sharing of knowledge, the access to knowledge, across all forms of expertise is so powerful. I'd like to ask Mike, maybe, to start off. Having been a student at MIT, and watched how this institute has evolved. What do you think about the way that students are contributing to this knowledge, and colleagues around the world are contributing to this knowledge, all together mixed up with what the MIT faculty are teaching? What does that indicate to us about the power of this movement? Sure, I'd be happy to answer that. So in terms of how does the mere presence of OpenCourseWare enable students, and colleagues, and other instructors from around the world to contribute, just the very fact that it exists in this purely open and free environment, like Hal so well said, is the deciding factor that just allows humanity to share its knowledge. This, to me, is the single best thing in education. It's the largest thing I know of just free knowledge access to the world. And so, in every interaction I have, from the emails I'm getting during the pandemic of people saying, I've watched all your lectures and they've kept me going and intellectually stimulated, to hearing how other faculty at the schools around the country and around the world have said, hey, I took your lectures, and we added these other new labs. Bring them back to MIT. This, the whole idea of open sharing is infectious in the best possible way. And once you get hooked, it's hard to stop, which also gets at one of the questions I saw on the chat, which is, how do you convince faculty to participate? I think by participating. It's the single biggest factor to me, as somebody who has both benefited from and contributed to OCW, it's altruism. It's the desire for your, what you learned and what you can teach to impact humanity for the better. That's, to me, the whole reason I get up in the morning, and I think that's the case for most people in the world, they want to do good. They want to see themselves do good. And OpenCourseWare provides this enormous attractive force for everyone to see a part of themselves in this rapidly evolving and improving open educational space. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. It's great to see that some of the questions coming in, I'd like to encourage people, again, to keep those questions coming. I think that question of, what would you say to folks who are a little unsure about participating in open sharing, they may have some hesitations. I'd like to open that up to the whole panel for a moment and invite other reflections on that. Mussie, Anjali-- So, I would say that the act of sharing gets you to be reflective in a way that I think can serve your goals as an instructor, and a teacher. So that's one reason to share. And the other is, to Mike's point, it is pretty addictive. I keep coming up with new ideas of things to share. Like, little experiments I've tried. Let's put that up, let's share that. Or reflections I have. I love the educator version of courses that allows you, as the instructor, to have a kind of sidebar conversation with the audience, and talk through your experience, and your philosophy. I think that's a pretty cool feature. And OCW has not been afraid to do all kinds of different experiments. So I had students a few years ago who were from Spanish-speaking countries and Portuguese-speaking countries. We tried getting-- they recorded their experience in English, but also in their native languages. And that was pretty cool. We just gave that a shot. OCW was totally willing to do it. And we didn't actually have that capability hard-baked into the OCW platform at the time, but that didn't stop you guys from helping to figure it out. It's fun, figuring those things out together. Yeah. Mussie? Yeah. So I kind of want to answer this in two ways. The first is, to a certain extent, it's really about vulnerability, isn't it? You're putting all your content out as an institution. You're kind of saying, this is what I do. And you'll get feedback, whether you like it or not. But that vulnerability comes with a grain of, you can learn. You, as the institution, can learn how to do what you're supposed to be doing better. And the other part of it is, and I think for a lot of institutions, it's the fear of, well, the value that students pay for will be open for free. And for institutions, that fear that, I really want to pose the question of, is that your only value? Is the content your only value? And if it is, there's a world of content coming. Don't be Blockbuster when Netflix came up and not adapt. Find and create value, in education still, but find a way that's not just only content, and ride the wave, as opposed to-- Yeah. Good. Great. So I think there are enormous opportunities for MIT, and as Mussie just mentioned, you know, what's really MIT's value? It's not a kid sitting down watching television. But I wanted to make a more general point, that when we openly share things, for anyone, not just MIT, we're enriching the fount that's the source of our creativity. When we started MIT, when we started OpenCourseWare, Chuck Vest wrote a nice little piece of about that where he said, he thought the image of students all over the world sitting and all looking at presentations by the top faculty in the world, that, for him, he said, was one of his recurring nightmares. That's not what OpenCourseWare is about. OpenCourseWare is enriching the basis by which we all do creativity, not just a couple of top classes, but everyone. I wanted to introduce a word that comes from Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard Law School called A Generative Platform. A generative platform is where there are many, many, many people openly collaborating and creating new things, including things that were not anticipated by the people who created the platform. So what I'm hoping, and OpenCourseWare is doing so well, is really being generative in that way. Because it's not that MIT and five other places can make a vision of education for all of humanity, it's that we can enable other people to build on our work. Yeah Yeah. I'd love to use that as a springboard into a reflection on what we'd like to see from the future of OCW. If you can project 20 years out, that's great, but I'll take 5. Where do you think we can go with this generative potential? Maybe start with Mussie? So, I've had the opportunity to be a user, and come to MIT and kind of see that increase in value. And, again, I would love if OCW drove that. So what I mean by that is collaboration. A huge part of my MIT experience has been the fact that I can work on problems with people. I can see how they think, they can see how I think, and we end up thinking better. So seeing OCW become a platform for everyone in the world to kind of come together. For people that don't necessarily know each other to go on a path of education together, I think, would be a huge help. Especially because me, as a user, it was somewhat difficult doing it alone. It's easy to kind of fall off the wagon. Another vision of OCW I have is that we, again, lead this movement of open educational resources. And that goes back to my very first point of we put our name behind it, and we pull other institutions with us. We bring them in and we sell them on the idea that if we open this up, there is real value to be created for the whole. I like it. Yeah, and you sort of answered a question we had from Mustaffa about getting students to meet around the world, is there some way to use OCW in that spirit? Yeah, we see great potential in that. It's an area that we've experimented with, off and on, over the years. Continue to be working on, and yeah. I hope to see more take shape. Let's see, Anjali, thoughts for the future? So I have many conflicting thoughts. I'll just share a couple. I love the idea of meetups of some kind. I think that a recommendation engine of some kind, or a linkage engine of some kind would be really interesting. And maybe not just a very predictable, like, now that you've taken Linear Algebra I take Linear Algebra II, but something that kind of pushes us a little bit. And we know that people are looking at using expert systems and other methods to pull out content from learners to figure out what they need to learn next. I do like that idea. I also think we've seen a huge growth in open educational materials, and teaching management, I mean really, some of it is not great. So I think we also need to think about the quality piece. Do we just assume, because it comes out of MIT, it's all great? What's our method for figuring out and validating excellent content? If you teach a course at MIT, you know it's good, but there may be ways in which-- maybe by stitching together more meta information, we could round out the picture more. So if you take a class on, I don't know, financial models for something, maybe you also learn about poverty, or something. Something that kind of rounds it out a little, so that we're getting well-rounded views. I think we've sparked a revolution in open education. I saw that a lot with medical information, for instance. I think there's a lot more work to be done. So I'm really excited for the next chapter. Yeah. Me too. Thank you. Mike, any reflections on the future? Sure. I'd sum it up with three words, which would be renewal, enrichment, and humanization. I'll start with renewal, which I think is the easiest one. We've created this amazing engine for getting content out there, and we need to keep it current. And that's not just going to involve getting the next piece that's up there every five years, but convincing new faculty to have new interpretations of the courses, so that there'll be multiple teaching styles for each one, and students can look through some of the lectures and ideas, and find the one that suits them best. I'd say enrichment, because there are things that OpenCourseWare is doing now that I think we need to do more of. For example, podcasts with some of the instructors on their educational philosophy. On how they design courses, how they get hands-on elements into what could be dry and boring courses. That also feeds into humanization of knowledge. To build on something Mussie was saying, if there's no downside to contributing to OCW, and the upsides are enormous besides the ones that we've talked about here. To me, it's the humanization of not just knowledge in general, but of these supposedly lofty MIT faculty in particular. Those of us here know that we all make mistakes, and say stupid things, and the power structure here is pretty flat, but I've come to learn that's not how we're viewed from the outside unless you already know us. And I think it's important to be on YouTube, making occasional mistakes, which I certainly did in my 22.01 Intro to Nuclear Physics lectures. I had a couple of goofs on the length of the control rods from Chernobyl, which you might imagine is a pretty popular topic to watch because of the TV series going on now, and that's not a downside. There's an upside to be able to crowdsource corrections, and project your own humanity in the fact that, yeah, we're at MIT but we make mistakes too, you can watch us do it for all eternity. It doesn't scare me. To me, it's a bonus. Great. Yeah. Love that spirit. Hal, there's a question in the chat that maybe sort of pertains to one aspect of projecting the future, how you had raised the three things at the beginning. Somebody has asked about the future of open research and how, maybe, that connects and supports the mission of OCW. If you care to respond to that, or anything else about the future. Yeah, well, the future is hard to predict. You talked about 20 years, or 5 years. I would actually be happy, now, with about 6 months. Because what's happening now is, this is like 20 years ago, where there is this enormous sense of possibility coming from the internet. And OpenCourseWare latched into that, and when we look back, we're all delighted with how that worked out and we say that what we did then was counterintuitive, but it was right and kind of obvious. But the world is changing. This is like 20 years ago, but vastly different. When we thought about OpenCourseWare, we thought about new opportunities, we thought about changes, we thought about what happened but what we didn't think about is enormous change in the very structure of tertiary education. And that's what we're talking about now. You know, especially accelerated by COVID, but coming before that. So I talked-- I mentioned a little bit about how the founders of Columbia Fathom came to us and in 2000, 2001, and said, you know, why don't you join us, and we were going down this path of openness. I'll tell you another story. In 2012, the founders of Coursera came to us and said, Stanford is about to create Coursera, and would MIT like to partner in making this tremendous thing about online courses? And we sort of said, well, you know, they're thinking about a closed, proprietary architecture, and not a thing that people can contribute to. And at MIT, we sort of said, well, no. OK. Last week, Coursera had its IPO, it went up 45% at IPO, and it's valued now at about $60 billion. That's something to think about. Are we still thinking about openness? Are we still thinking about the importance of generative platforms to the extent that we were then? This is a real challenge. And it's really something that we need to think about. And it is not obvious. So while we're celebrating having made, certainly, the right choice 20 years ago, what does that mean for today? I think we all need to think about that very seriously. Thank you. Yeah, looking forward to continuing to work with you and everybody else around our community on that one. Yeah, so thank you all for a really great discussion. And I appreciate all the points that you've raised. Lots more to keep talking about. In the last few minutes, we're going to project forward into our future in a more kind of concrete way, and talk about the next generation OCW. And I'd like to welcome my colleague Krishna back into the call to start sharing some reflections and more information about the next generation of OCW. Thank you very much, Curt. And thank you Hal, Mussie, Anjali, and Mike for that great discussion. I, actually, I can't resist. I'll say to Hal the singular moment in 2001 that you described is real and critical, but I also think that in another way, what you and others did back then flowed from 100 years of history at MIT, and a sense of our values and principles. And if you go back to the very founding of MIT, President William Barton Rogers, who founded MIT, thought he had a great way to teach that was new at the time. This is in the 1870s. And he rode by train up and down the East Coast, spreading his way of teaching to places like Yale, and Princeton, and that place, other place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So this goes back to the very beginning. Of course, the technological means of sharing was completely different in 2001 than in 1870. Curt, can you share your slide? I don't know if that has already happened or not. So as we look to the coming 20 years, as we celebrate OCW's 20th birthday and look ahead to its next 20 years, we are very excited to be developing a next generation platform and program that Curt and I are going to tell you a little bit about now. And I want to emphasize, platform and program. This is as much about program as platform, although it's about both. Many of the things that I'll say in the next few minutes actually come directly from what was said by the panelists. One of our central goals in thinking about the next generation OCW platform and program, is to make sure that we can offer the world a vibrant and up-to-date sharing of the MIT curriculum, as it evolves. This is something that Mike spoke about. Its content will evolve as we at MIT address grand challenges of today, like social justice, and sustainability, and the future of computing. The means by which we teach also evolve. It's our hope that going into the future, as now, OCW will be the place that MIT faculty can share openly the way that they teach, how they teach, as well as what they teach. And that requires a new platform in many, many senses. On the back end, it requires a platform that will allow us to update, and refresh, and keep vibrant hundreds and hundreds of courses every year, which is something that we're not able to do today, but we will be able to do very soon. I'll also, for riff a minute on Mussie, what Mussie said. What you come to MIT for, which goes beyond the content that we can share through OCW and many other means, is engagement. And what we want to do with OCW is to give learners and educators elsewhere, in their communities, the ability to create their own magic, just as MIT students and faculty create with the engagement that they experience on campus. Engagement in so many different senses. We hope that we empower that, but the educators elsewhere who use these materials to create the engagement for their students are the key, actually, to that. Returning to the platform side of it, the new platform which all of you, Curt, is very exciting-- Curt is going to tell you in a few minutes how you can get a sneak peek, an early look, at our new platform, which will offer a seamless discovery and learning experiences, new modes of discovery, new modes of search, learning experiences on mobile devices. Early look at this starting today for all of you who are here. We anticipate launching this new platform later this calendar year, and we look forward to getting feedback from all of you, starting today in fact. Another aspect of the new platform will be integrations with the learning management systems that educational institutions use, so that open content from OCW can better flow into the educational ecosystems of other institutions. Again, platform and program. And I already spoke at the beginning about the importance of collaborations across the OER ecosystem if we want to build from access to equity. OCW has done a magnificent job now for of offering access to the curriculum from MIT, to the teaching from MIT, to the learning from MIT. I'll also mention that we already have a podcast, it was mentioned by Mike. Chalk Radio is a podcast where you can listen to MIT faculty as they tell you how to use these materials in your teaching, because they will describe how they use it in theirs. We have instructor insights, but to really realize a vision of equity, we need learning pathways that are different for different people, because different people come from different starting points. And that means we need the entire OER ecosystem, a web of institutions and entities across the ecosystem, collaborating and working together to realize this grand vision. That's a brief intro to this vision behind NextGen OCW. Curt now it's going to give you a sneak peek. Thanks Krishna. And I'd like to invite people to drop your thoughts in the chat of whatever you're using to watch this event. What would you wish for from the future of OCW? We'd love to hear from you. Now, it is my great pleasure to introduce to you the current working, very early draft version of the next generation OCW website. And as Krishna said, we're going to invite people to join us in this process of working with it, experimenting with it, and giving us your feedback. So this is the site, and links should be going out in the chats of your streams for how you can sign up to be a beta tester on this site. We are those 2,500 courses to the site, and they're all up here in various forms. And we're keeping up with the latest hot topics out in the world. Let's take blockchain for instance. Our blockchain course, taught by Professor Gary Gensler is on here. And you can explore it not only on the current regular ocw.mit.edu website, but here on NextGen, and explore, for instance, the very popular video lectures. They are all here for you to watch and keep checking out. There's, again, all the courses from across the collection that you'll find here. Courses, for instance, World Water Day was last week, you want to learn about the intersection of water and climate change. We've got great courses on topics like this as well. What I'm showing you here is kind of the laptop, or computer version. We're really excited that the next generation platform will be able to work well on mobile, and so I just shrink down the size of the window here, you can see how the template adapts and you can continue to work effectively on your mobile phone, because we know, for many people around the world, their phone, their smartphone is the device. And so giving people a really good experience on the phone is an essential part of what we're setting up to do with Next Generation. So, again, you have an opportunity. We invite you to join us in testing out this next generation platform as it evolves through the summer and into the fall. And we're really excited about what the future brings. Many of the things that have been talked about in the panel, and people have been asking about, we are actively working on. Anjali mentioned better ways to discover content. We're exploring with bringing the latest techniques in machine learning, and so on, to make our search interface work better. Better ways for people to find and collaborate with each other when they are users of OCW. Language translations. Continuing to run the podcast, the Chalk Radio podcast. All of these things will be continuing. So do, please do reach out to us-- If I can just jump in and just say to everyone, first of all, thank you in advance for all your feedback. But second of all, I hope you're starting to see how we can respond to some of the challenges from the questions from the audience. In fact, one of you asked, how do we motivate faculty to participate? I actually think, I think what we, inside of MIT, will have the opposite problem. As we launch this NextGen platform and program, we're going to have to handle a flood of faculty who want to participate. And not only the flood of faculty want to participate, but actually the students of MIT. Mussie is a tremendous example, but we are hearing from other students how they, too, want to participate in contributing to OCW, and in prompting faculty to contribute. So we look forward to taking advantage of this next platform, this NextGen platform and program, to handle a flood of interest, and this, I think, really does flow from what everyone-- what's not to like about sharing on OCW, given what you've heard from Anjali and Mike? And Hal? We have to be ready for a 1,000 faculty who want to do so, and we look forward to this challenge. Well put. Yeah. The future is very bright, thank you. Thank you, Krishna. So, we're so glad that you joined us today to celebrate this auspicious 20th anniversary, and look forward with us into the future. We really value your continued support, whether that's sharing OCW with your networks, using it in whatever learning capacity that you would like to. Please do join us, if you're willing, as a beta tester for the emergent next generation OCW site, and in any other ways that you can see. We love to hear from you. Please sign up at our monthly newsletter to stay on top of it. Follow us on all the social media channels. And we very much look forward to continuing to support you in your learning journeys. Yeah. Thank you so much.