MIT Milestone Celebration Highlights for High School Announcement

SPEAKER: I'd like to move now to a special announcement and bring back President Susan Hockfield, who will describe the next chapter, I would say, in the unfolding of the OpenCourseWare movement. SUSAN HOCKFIELD: Yes. [CHUCKLES] You don't have to sit here. You may move back to-- [LAUGHTER] Thank you all. That was a great panel. Thank you. Thank you, audience participants also. This is open sourcing of information. You all participate. So I get the great fun of today, which is announcing the next chapter in OpenCourseWare. Now as you have probably gathered of the [INAUDIBLE] today, if you all weren't there at the very beginning, that OpenCourseWare was designed really for university and college faculty and their students. And the idea was to share what we do on this campus with what happens on other campuses. And it has been successful, I would say, probably beyond almost anyone's wildest, wildest dreams, depending on how you count visits to the OpenCourseWare, whether it's just your OpenCourseWare, to many of the mirror sites or the translation sites. About 1.8 million people visit OpenCourseWare over the course of a month-- astonishingly successful. Among the perhaps more surprising statistics from OCW are that, first, about 60% of the use of OCW is coming from outside of the United States. And even though it was designed for college and university professors and their students, about half of the users of OpenCourseWare are independent learners. That, I have to tell you, is the most surprising statistic for me. Now among these independent learners, or people who don't fit in that category that we imagined would be the recipients of OpenCourseWare, are on the order of 15,000 high school participants a month, About 5,000 students and 10,000 teachers. Now we have to remember that OpenCourseWare is MIT coursework. It's not standard. This is pretty high-level coursework. And it's been, I would say, surprising and encouraging to all of us to learn about the use of OpenCourseWare by high school students and high school teachers. As many of you know that as demands for educating in the United States, educating to meet tests and all kinds of demands in education, many schools have cut back on their programs for the talented and gifted students. And what we have heard from high school teachers and students is that they were using the OpenCourseWare materials to supplement their standard high school curriculum in ways that are no longer possible just using their own materials. And one of the questions that we looked at with OpenCourseWare is how could we serve this particular population better and how could we inspire them. So today we're announcing the new chapter, the next chapter in OpenCourseWare, which is a new program. And it's, I would say, we would call it a pilot program, although it's so well-developed that it's a little bit larger than a pilot. It builds on the foundations of OpenCourseWare, with the goal of making OCW more accessible and more useful for high school students and teachers. It's called Highlights for High School. Highlights for High School is a customized portal into OCW, into its content that's been designed specifically to meet the needs of high school students and teachers. And our idea is to share MIT's expertise and the trove of exceptional teaching resources that exist on OCW in a way that will better serve the high school students and teachers who have interest in and hunger for these materials. We also hope that providing a more useful window into MIT OCW will inspire more students in high school to pursue careers in science and engineering, to pursue studies at a higher level in science and engineering that they might otherwise be able to do. OpenCourseWare-- there'll be a little video at a minute telling you about the details of it. But as I said, it's a portal specifically designed for high school students and their teachers. Many people have asked me is, why would MIT get involved in high school education, K through 12 education? And it's something that MIT has been interested in and actually involved in for a very long time. We have a distinguished history and tradition of public service. In the 1950s, MIT, in collaboration with the Physical Science Study Committee transformed high school and college physics education through the PSSC curricula. I used it when I was in high school. It was not that well branded, so I didn't know until I arrived at MIT that the physics curriculum I studied in high school actually came out of MIT. Many of this audience probably used the same materials. Today, on campus, there are over 40 programs that reach out into the K through 12 community, to students and to teachers, to try to provide whatever help we can to increase the entrance and enthusiasm for science engineering. We're doing this because across the nation, there's a general recognition of the need for better quality K through 12 science and engineering education and math. And let me just read from a speech that Bill Gates gave at the National Education Summit on High Schools in February 2005 that kind of casts our dilemma in particularly stark forms. "When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I'm terrified for our workforce of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, US students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations." In a survey in the Chronicle of Higher Education in January 2006, about 32% of college faculty thought that high school students are only somewhat well-prepared for college studies in math and science. And only 5% found their students to be well-prepared. I think, at this point, almost everyone recognizes that this is a national problem. And I would say, in the eyes of many, including myself, this is a national crisis. Highlights for High School represents a small step on the part of MIT to help address this important challenge. And over the next couple of months, as we roll out for use Highlights for High School, we're going to be using our portfolio evaluation tools to measure access to the site, efficacy of the site, the impact of the program to understand what works and what doesn't to inform us as we move into the next stages. Highlights for High School was developed with the help of MIT faculty, MIT students, high school teachers, and high school students. And we welcome many of the people who helped put together highlights for high school here today. Of course, none of these kinds of efforts come without cost, and Highlights for High School was made possible by generous financial support by many people. And I want to comment particularly on Charlene and Derry Kabcenell, who are with us today. Charlene and Derry, great to have you with us as we launch the next chapter. Barry and Stacy Newman, and the Lord Foundation, whose chairman Sheldon Buckler was with us today. Sheldon, welcome to MIT. Thank you for your help. And next, we're going to show you a very short video that gives you more details about Highlights for High School.