MIT Milestone Celebration Welcome

STEVE LERMAN: Welcome. I know there'll be a few additional people. And if people could slide over, that'd be great, as new people arrive. It's my pleasure to welcome all of you here today. My name's Steve Lerman. And I've been at MIT a long time, but I certainly, for this occasion, my singular honor has been to be associated with OpenCourseWare since its inception. I served as chair of the Interim Management Board and am now chair of the Faculty Advisory Board. It's my privilege to be your emcee today. But in fact, while this event is meant to honor the achievements of OpenCourseWare, I sort of like to emphasize my own view that the best is still yet to come. In 2001, MIT made an extraordinary commitment to publish in electronic form the teaching materials we use in virtually all our courses, the entire undergraduate and graduate curriculum of this institution. And we committed to make those materials freely and openly available for any non-commercial purposes, including giving people the right to reuse them, to modify them, and to repurpose them in other ways for educational and research purposes. Today, a little more than six years later, we're here to celebrate the fulfillment of that initial promise. This accomplishment was possible because of the dedication of the MIT staff and faculty, the commitment of a dedicated OpenCourseWare staff, the tremendous financial support of donors, and the extraordinary leadership of the MIT senior administration. MIT OpenCourseWare now provides the materials for 1,800 courses to educators and learners throughout the world, unlocking what was previously a closely held treasure trove of human knowledge. Astonishing figure-- to date, these materials have reached an estimated 35 million people. We welcome the many friends and supporters of OpenCourseWare who are here to share with us the celebration. We are also privileged to have with us today colleagues from other institutions around the world who have made OpenCourseWare a global movement, rather than just an MIT project. Some are representatives from the 160 members of the OpenCourseWare consortium that has recently been formed. There are more than 3,000 courses beyond those we, from MIT, provide that are now freely available through OpenCourseWare sites around the world from other academic institutions. We'd like to make a special note to the representatives of the OpenCourseWare site just launched today from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. This site just opened for public access, as far as I understand it, this morning. We also have with us today our translation partners. About 600 of MIT's courses are now available in other languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Thai, as well as some other languages. Together, these translations have made OpenCourseWare content accessible to about 14 million other individuals worldwide, beyond those that our site has reached. And we're joined today by the OpenCourseWare External Advisory board members from around the country and abroad. We're honored to have so many of you here. We had a meeting this morning, which was yet another stimulating and fascinating discussion about the potential that OpenCourseWare can unlock as we make knowledge available globally and more accessible around the world. This afternoon, we'll revisit the path MIT took to reach this moment. Explore the impact of OpenCourseWare on the world and on education here in the United States and abroad. And look to the future of OpenCourseWare in education, both in the short-term and in the longer term. We're fortunate to have here as our keynote speaker today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. I'll introduce him more in detail later, but he'll talk about individual empowerment and how the internet and innovative uses, such as OpenCourseWare, of that technology are making a difference for people around the world. We're also going to have a panel of distinguished academics, researchers, and scientists. That will include Hal Ableson, Charles Vest, John Seely Brown, and Sam Pitroda. And they'll help us explore the implications and the future possibilities of OpenCourseWare. Later this afternoon, we'll also announce the launch of a new and exciting MIT OpenCourseWare initiative for secondary education, yet another chapter in the growing story of what happens when we make course materials accessible and freely available. But first, let me introduce the president of MIT, Dr. Susan Hockfield. She serves as MIT's 16th president. And she'll give us her reflections on OpenCourseWare. I'd like to mention I went back to her inauguration materials. I was involved in that. And I recall that the theme of her inauguration festivities, the sort of tagline, was this sort of catchy phrase, uncommon in common, which tried to evoke what's uncommon about the place, and what we share in common with each other at MIT and elsewhere around the world. I can think of almost nothing we've done at MIT that better embodies that tag phrase than OpenCourseWare. As someone will tell you later, over 90% of the faculty of MIT have actually donated materials, their course materials. It's something we have in common. And the uncommonness of the decision of MIT around 2000, 2001 to take those materials and make them freely accessible is truly uncommon. So with that, I'm going to turn this over to Susan. [APPLAUSE] SUSAN HOCKFIELD: Thank you, Steve. It is a great joy to be here today for the celebration of where we are and the celebration of where we're going to go. I want to begin my comments by thanking our faculty. The MIT faculty, as Steve just said, they invented OpenCourseWare. And they've made it the success that it is. Like so much of MIT, it's also true for OpenCourseWare, our faculty are the real stars of our show. It was a committee of faculty from MIT that first proposed the idea of OpenCourseWare in 2000. And since then, Steve just said, about 90% of the MIT faculty have participated voluntarily by contributing their teaching materials to the free and open publication in OCW. Now, I say voluntarily. This is the nature by which we do the work of the university. Our faculty do things voluntarily. And it is simply wonderful that our faculty chose to participate in OpenCourseWare at such a level. It's a remarkable level of participation, 90%. I'm not sure there are many things, or even one or two things, that you could say all of our faculty have chosen to do in unison the way they have chosen to participate in OpenCourseWare. And it really underscores the dedication of our faculty to MIT's teaching mission. Often people think of a place like MIT, which has a very profound research mission, and imagine that our faculty are only devoted to the research mission. But we are enormously benefited by our faculty's dedication to the teaching mission. And they take this responsibility very seriously. Our faculty are passionate about teaching. And they're remarkably good at it. Over the years, this has been reflected in the admiration MIT students have for their professors. And since OpenCourseWare launched, we've seen that kind of admiration reflected in the comments of people who have used OpenCourseWare around the world. In addition to the faculty, our students have played a seminal role in OpenCourseWare. They've been integral to its success, both as OCW staff and as collaborators. MIT students have helped to publish the faculty materials and have contributed content. As part of two of our international programs, the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative, which we call MISTI, which is a program where we place MIT students around the world, and a second program called the Africa Internet Technology Initiative, both of these are essentially summer programs. MIT students have traveled to China and to Africa to teach courses at other universities using OpenCourseWare materials. In fact, what they've done in distant universities is help the faculty at those universities understand how they can use OpenCourseWare in their courses. And last but not least, our students have themselves encouraged faculty to participate in OCW at a level that we could never have achieved without them. This kind of student-faculty collaboration is really at the heart of MIT. Now, in addition to the students and the faculty, there are many, gee, an enormous number of individuals-- advisors, institutional partners, and of course, the OCW staff-- who deserve our thanks for their remarkable dedication OCW and to the realization of its promise that we're celebrating today. Now, there's a special section in your program where we list the people, and I would send your attention to that as a way of understanding who and how many participated in this. But I do want to mention just a few people by name whose extraordinary contributions and leadership really had a huge impact on OCW. First, I want to call out the faculty leaders. I think many of them, if not most of them, are here. Dick Yue, Hal Ableson, Steve Lerman, Tom Magnanti, Shigeru Miyagawa. Without their visionary contributions and unflagging support, the OCW project would not have become what it is today. And I would just ask these faculty leaders please to stand so we can thank them. [APPLAUSE] Believe it or not, institutional leaders sometimes have a role in what happens that's good at a university. And there are two past institutional leaders who were exceptional and actually unwavering champions of OCW from its initial concept to its inception and through its initial stages. MIT president Emeritus Chuck Vest, now president of the National Academy of Engineering, and former provost of MIT, Bob Brown, who's now president of Boston University were tireless advocates of OCW, both on and off campus. Their leadership was instrumental in securing the funding that allowed MIT to get started. And you know, in bringing early skeptics of the program on campus to understanding some of the opportunities that OCW presented. I don't think Bob is here, but Chuck is. And let's thank Chuck also. [APPLAUSE] And last in this line of individual recognition is OCW's founding executive director, Anne Marguiles. Anne, much to our sadness, but joy in her next opportunity, she left MIT mighty earlier this fall to take a role in public service with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She has taken on another opportunity for transformation, another opportunity that will allow her to serve thousands and thousands of people. Anne was executive OCW from its inception. And we owe much of the success of OCW to her day-to-day leadership and her exquisite managerial expertise. Anne, thank you for joining us today. And thank you for your contributions-- [APPLAUSE] Now, what you're going to hear about today are a lot of numbers reflecting the use of OpenCourseWare. And you know, numbers after numbers after numbers that express the success and the penetration of OCW into the minds and lives of many. I would just provide one anecdote. Everywhere I go, all over the world, people provide me with OCW anecdotes. And you know, they capture, in interesting ways, this spark of curiosity that got led to the satisfaction of an educational desire that was made. One insight into the impact of OCW actually comes from my daughter who is of that young generation who lives out there on the frontier of technology. I only visit the frontier through her and our students. I'm not out there myself. I'm too old. But in the middle of September, I was on a trip. And I was talking to our daughter on the telephone. And she said, mom, you've got to go on iTunes Video. This is not a site that I had bookmarked, I can tell you. And she said, what you'll find on iTunes Video are some MIT courses. But what she was pointing out to me is that iTunes Video does a Best 10, a Top 10 ranking. It's always changing, telling you what the top 10 videos are. Now, you all probably know that iTunes has a segment of the site that's iTunes U, so iTunes University. This is not iTunes University I'm talking about. I'm talking just about iTunes Video. For a week or two, I don't know how long it lasted, but certainly for the middle week in the middle of September, there were two OpenCourseWare videos that were ranked in the top 10. Guess what they were? Number three was Classical Mechanics. We know it as 801. Number seven, Differential Equations, 1803. Go figure. I mean. What this expresses to me is the hunger in this world for quality education, the hunger for great educational materials. And I would say-- and reflected on that is our joy in having provided OCW to a world that is using it so wonderfully. We're delighted that all of you had joined us this afternoon. Thank you for coming to help us celebrate. But also, thank you for coming to partner with us as we reflect on OpenCourseWare and its impact. And we also think about where OCW might take us in the future. Now, the story of OCW is best told by the faculty who created it and the individuals who use it. So we will begin the afternoon with a short video that tells you a little bit more about OpenCourseWare. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]