MIT's Institutional Decision to do OpenCourseWare

great welcome back everybody um this is a part of a pro of the program that I have really been looking forward to uh quite a bit as we've been planning this uh I think it's a really wonderful wonderful opportunity for all of us uh to hear from people who were involved uh in mit's decision to undertake its open courseware project 10 years ago which was a I think a very different uh world than uh the world living in today um as we heard from Tim O'Reilly as we heard from Susan hawkfield there were many influences many other movements uh toward openness on the internet and so uh this doesn't stand on obviously um even within education there were there were other prominent projects that were being launched uh webcast Berkeley was starting up and connections was starting up uh Wikipedia even could be considered an uh open education Resource as well and I and certainly was getting started about that time um but mit's announcement on April 4 2001 is probably the clearest starting point we have of the history of uh the open courseware movement at least as uh institutional efforts are concerned and and so we're starting with that today as the starting point of our exploration of the history of the open courseware movement um now in my role at MIT open course whereare uh I work with the media a lot and so I've probably told the Genesis story of open course where more than any other person uh at MIT um but this is really sort of a unique situation for me because I'm probably the least qualified person on the stage right now to be talking about MIT open courseware um but I'll go ahead and give the Genesis story with all of its flaws and and probably uh Mis perceptions about how the project got started and then let uh the gentleman on the panel correct me as we go along um but the the Legends as it was handed down to me was that around 1999 2000 uh MIT was struggling with the question of what to do about uh educational technology and in particular the internet a question that was ultimately handed by the Provost and the president to a committee now one of the things that I usually leave out of this is there were actually two committees involved one was the standing committee that was formed in 1999 called the Council on educational technology which still meets today regularly at MIT to advise the provos and the president um that committee handed off a number of different aspects of their charge to sub committees and one of those aspects was distance learning or the impact of the internet on education and that was handed to a committee on lifelong learning uh in at the beginning of the summer of the year 2000 that committee worked throughout the summer they brought in boo Allen they brought in uh some other help and they created a bunch of business models and they looked at the question of online learning distance education and they were really confronted with two problems one was they didn't feel like it was a very good fit with the MIT mission to disseminate knowledge and the other was they couldn't figure out a good way to make uh the economics of it work and so at the end of the summer they were really uh pretty convinced that distance learning wasn't the direction to go for MIT but they really didn't have a proposal and so at that point they kind of went back to the basics of what is the internet good at Distributing content widely and cheaply and what is MIT good at which is uh residential education and they combin the two and said why not use the internet to distribute the materials we create for our residential experience over openly on the internet and so uh at least as it was told to me there was a a report that was about that thick uh that gave all the reasons why distance learning probably wasn't going to work for MIT and on top of it was a one-page suggestion that we give away all of our course materials so every time I speak to one of the the gentlemen at the table or anyone else who is involved with uh the creation of open course where I learned something new a Nuance about how open courseware came about what the circumstances were like at that point in time uh that helps me uh inform my thinking about the core challenges that all of us face in our own open course where it's how do we get and maintain uh buyin from our communities how do we recruit faculty what do you do about the intellectual property concerns and so I'm pleased to share that opportunity for insight with the rest of the open courseware uh Community we have with us today three of The Faculty who were involved in the proposal for open course Weare and three of the administrators who re received and supported that proposal uh the three faculty members are all members of our faculty advisory committee uh the first Professor Hal ablon who also at the time of open course where's proposal chair at mit's Council and educational technology or co-chaired as I understand uh Professor dick U who uh chaired the committee on lifelong learning the proposed open course Weare and Professor shiru M aawa who uh served on the lifelong learning committee and is also the chair of our faculty advisory committee in addition to that we're very fortunate today to have three of the senior administrators at MIT at the time who are are generously sharing their time uh for this panel uh we're joined by Dr Charles vest who's now the president of the National Academy of engineering and was at the time the president of MIT Dr Robert Brown who's currently the president of Boston University and was the Provost uh at MIT at the time the proposal for MIT open course whereare came out and Dr Lawrence Bako who was Chancellor at MIT at the time of MIT MIT open course where proposal and is currently the president of tus University so welcome and thank you all for sharing your time um so having given that uh account of MIT open course where's creation I'm now going to O open the floor for rebuttal first from from uh Dr vest by asking what was going through your mind when you first heard what the proposal was going to be coming out of that committee well thank you very much Steve and I'm just can't tell you how thrilled I am to have this group here and realize we're actually celebrating uh 10 years um I I want to take very seriously the point of this panel to give historical perspective so I could invent a very flowery version and a very Visionary version of what happened but I want to tell you what from my point of view happened and the reason I'm uh so looking forward to this panel is at long last I'll find out what really did happen 10 years ago what really happened is it was a joke but um I I want to begin by pointing out two big lessons that I take away from this whole adventure and it is an adventure and the first lesson is one that it reinforced dramatically which is that the really great ideas in the University don't come come from the top down they come from The Faculty they occasionally come from the students they sometimes come from the staff but the key to doing great things is to keeping your ear to the ground and listening because that's where the Innovation creativity generally comes from certainly did in this case and the second thing is and it may sound a little polanish but it also taught me in a very dramatic way that if you have a really great idea somehow you're going to find the means and in this case the financial means to accomplish it so with those two things in mind I I want to give you two pieces of background and then I'll very quickly tell you what my earliest experience was uh regarding ocw and its Inception one piece of background is that uh I went to University and graduate school in the very late 50s and early 60s and uh did my undergraduate work in mechanical engineering at West Virginia University far removed from MIT in many ways I did my uh doctoral work at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and there was something very common to those two experiences that was absolutely what came to mind when I first heard the uh idea of ocw um as most of you perhaps all of you know and Susan mentioned it I believe this morning um during World War II MIT hosted and operated together with the British the radiation lab to develop the British invention of radar into a real Deployable system that had a whole lot to do with the Allied victory in World War II and when the war was over astoundingly the government shut the lab down we never seem to stop things anymore but they closed it down and they did something really smart they gave some of the key people involved 6 months to write up what they had learned during that experience and what this did was create a whole new way of bringing a basis of rational science and first principles into how electrical engineering and ultimately more broadly engineering was taught and practice and this launched something that uh is is known in the in the trade as the engineering science Revolution and MIT not solely but certainly was the key to this revolution in teaching and learning in in Engineering in a very new way and how did it happen uh students were here earning phds in various fields of Engineering in a day in which there were not many large programs of phds in in engineering and the faculty with the follow on of this work from the rad lab and so forth were busily creating new ways of teaching bringing first principles of Science in underneath engineering they were writing notes many of which became uh um ultimately textbooks they were creating uh uh experiments laboratory experiments for teaching and all these guys and I have to admit they were mostly guys in those days uh with their freshly mined phds carried all these notes and they went out around the country including to places like West Virginia University and the University of Michigan and they used not a final product but they used those notes and started adding to them subtracting from them adapting them to context and it had a really dramatic impact first of all on me personally but much more importantly on the quality and nature of engineering education across across the United States second piece of background and then I'll pull this together uh many of you uh here work for various nonprofit organizations and you all know what happens when you propose an idea to a foundation you write them a letter or have a conversation and they say that's interesting uh uh how about a little pre-proposal and you do a five-page pre-proposal and they come back six months later and so well we thought about about this we'd like to see the costing and so forth you write a big proposal and after about two years they say well it's really great idea but I'm afraid it doesn't fit our mission and that's what usually happens to you so so bear that in mind so one day and you'll hear more about it uh and Steve was was quite accurate in the uh the role of the Council on engineer on educational technology and so forth that Bob had charged and we'll tell you a lot about one day Bob came into my office and and he said uh Chuck the uh uh committee is ready to report out their recommendation and I told them I'd come and find out whether you were ready to hear it or not are you sitting down and I said sure and he said well their conclusion is we could we should give away all of the course materials at MIT on all 2,000 of our subjects on the web for free for anybody that wants it now those of you who have worked with me uh uh closely like Bob and Larry and so forth no I tend to Maul I've got to hear all sides sit sleep roll around a bed wearing about at night but somehow this instantly connected in my mind with this experience of what MIT had done for engineering education in the late 50s and and through the 60s and I just instantly knew this was a wonderful elegant idea and I was uh so grateful it's nothing I would have ever thought of I'm I'm quite sure in fact as others will tell you we were really going in expecting what we probably would do would be produce Cutting Edge modules that would work with our industry Partners we work with and with very high-end students and we'd uh uh try to make money or at least least cover costs but I just for once in my life recognized what a beautiful idea it was and decided I was going to roll up my sleeves and and try to help my colleagu colleagues realize this wonderful vision and so u i called Bill Bowen who was uh at that time the former president of of Princeton University and somebody I just enormously admire and he was then the president of the melon foundation so I called up to see if I could get an appointment because I was going to be in New York for another reason he said my schedule's busy but we'll have breakfast together so uh I met bill for breakfast and uh a little place there not too far from melan's offices and I had a Florentine omelet I can still remember that and I said Bill and of course I'd really rehearsed what I wanted to say to him because I knew I didn't have much time I said Bill the faculty in MIT have come up with an extraordinary idea and because I respect you so much as a leader in higher education I want to know first of all do you think it's a good idea and second I want to know if you think it's a good idea do you think it's the kind of thing that might appeal to a foundation to support and third if you say the answer to that is yes I'm obviously going to ask you if you think the melon Foundation might be interested in supporting it and I then kind of laid out in just three or four or five sentences the idea and that this could accomplish the kind of things that I'd seen in an earlier age with these notes and experiments going out around the country but we could do it at internet time remember that was a big phrase those days internet time and we could do it for the whole world and Bill was silent for about half a minute and then he looked at me and he said we're going to figure out how to do this he said it's too much for melon but I'll get my board to agree to put some serious support in and we'll go together to heu it and we'll try to get the rest of it so having expected that I was launching into this two-year uh business uh we got a wonderful initial response and again uh from a sort of historical perspective I have to tell you something that I didn't know at the time I actually didn't know it for about 6 months after that Bill had just before this given a very prestigious lecture at Oxford University and the subject of his lecture was how are universities going to use the internet to promulgate their knowledge base and so you you know you you can never understand all the sort of psychological and and historical things that that go into a great great decisions so anyway uh from my perspective uh that was the uh the beginning of of the launch and the only other little anecdote I'll tell you on the funding part is it of course took a while to get this package to go to the melon Foundation board and uh Hal and others uh worked really hard on on getting it right and and building in it the idea of how we were going to instrument it and understand what it was doing and so forth and Bill called me back and I said so how did it go with the board and he said well they had one big question they want to know is this just one of Chuck's crazy ideas or is MIT Roy behind this so so anyway that's just a little bit of an opening but I very much look forward to my colleagues who really launched the the idea and then made it happen what they have to say great thank you U maybe then a question for Dr Brown uh maybe you could speak a little bit about uh the activities of our peer institutions and what they were doing at the time and how that influenced the thinking of uh mset as they handed off the charge to the committee on lifelong learning thank you steveen it is really a pleasure to be here this morning and and to celebrate the 10th anniversary of ocw I can remember times in the beginning of this project where we didn't think we'd ever get a first anniversary uh but I think it is important in in what Chuck said to set a bit of historical context and and although U great ideas like ocw really do come from the faulty the bottom up there was a nugget of an idea that was actually coming from the top down and and Chuck played an enormous role here here and it begins in the summer of 1998 when Larry and I had just assumed positions uh to work with Chuck in the upper administration at MIT and we sat down and had a meeting and and we did this almost annually uh to kind of chart the course for the next year at a where are we going to spend our time level what are the things beside making the trains run on time where are we going to spend our time u in the institution try to get mobilization behind concept and it was very clear in 1998 that MIT was underinvested in educational technology underinvested in how we were going to innovate in education interior internally and externally and there were questions about were we too stagnant and that we would wake up 5 years 10 years down the road and be left behind by others frankly and there were other things going on in the in the universe at that point uh within the 98 999 time frame Cornell launched Morningside Ventures which was a for-profit entity that was going to uh commercialize content and uh for Carnell e Carnell was formed Yale started their Alumni network which I think later Princeton joined and it morphed a few times Oxford Stanford Oxford Stanford so there were institution starting to mobilize based on the internet and so there was a real question on what the internet in and uh uh distance education in that context was going to do to for for uh MIT so after a period of consultation I remember talking to how I remember talking to Steve lman who was running a center on distance education within MIT at that point a lot of meetings we decided in the spring of 99 to form the Council on educational technology with a number of different purposes one is highlighting the demand for innovating in uh the classroom Within the institution and then the other uh working groups as Steve has said looking at the context for external impact both through our lumni and uh in the larger distance education world uh Steve laid out kind of the Genesis of the working groups and how the report was formed I the one underpinning I would like to keep adding to this is I it was one of the really interesting discussions all through this process is how this would change MIT not only giving the content of the world not only thinking about the the consequences as I like to say that there's a lot more smart people in the world than we can admit as students that there's a but there were other contexts that were going on simultaneously uh at at this at the same time what you you found inside uh MIT in the discussion of ocw is the issue of how would people use classroom time when all their content was on the web and and the what I call the great transference where you take a piece of chalk and you take your notes and you write your notes on the Blackboard and then they write their notes into their notebook which was the classical mode of teaching and was still very prevalent in the year 2000 at MIT what would happen if you broke that down if all the content for all those courses was on the web what would it mean for the discussion between a professor in mathematics and a professor in pick your favorite engineering discipline when they talk about the relevance of the course called differential equations when the you could the math professor could see how the content they were using in differential equation or teaching in differential equations was being used in chemical engineering or aerospace engineering or chemistry or physics and how the students could go see it even if the professor didn't that you could link these things back and forth because all the content the way it was being taught was available internally I think that those those ideas actually captivated a Fair number of the MIT faculty and brought them into the ocw initiative at the same time um when when you think about uh whether or not those things have actually occurred and how an institution uh changes over time we one of the things we deal with is that these institutions change culturally very very slowly and I think uh uh that ocw really marks a revolution in the way they share the content in inside in my both internally and externally great thank you very much did you want to jump in I just wanted to to add that uh you know it's it's easy to sit here with the benefit of 10 years of success to look back and and conclude that uh of course this is this is how it was going to turn out but it was also true that there was a fair amount of skepticism on the MIT faculty at the time and that there were faculty who were worried about um I think the the exas the phrase that that was um that was used was an another unfunded mandate uh that faculty would be required to spend uh considerable amounts of time uh putting their content up on the web uh and that this would distract them from what they saw as you know the real work of the faculty and again here I want to credit my colleagues uh who are sitting around me because I think that one of the ways in which this worked is uh Chuck was successful in getting hulet and melon to put a significant amount of money on the table so people understood immediately that there would be incremental resources to help folks and then the rest of these guys managed a conversation in which people basically put their hands up in terms of who was going to be an early adopter uh and the strategy that actually got faculty to understand that it wasn't going to be shoved down their throat that people who wanted to come forward would be helped um and that it created really an existence proof that it could be done um and that it it would Aid the faculty in their teaching um and in their scholarship uh The Faculty would not be inundated with more work that would come over the transom from the the kids who were you know surfing the web and God knows where who who wanted to communicate directly with faculty with questions about uh particular assignments I think one should not underestimate the impact of of those decisions which I think allowed for a roll out and an acceptance within a faculty that you know there was a fair amount of skepticism um at the time uh we were talking earlier at times like this I'm reminded of Lennon's comments uh comment about revolutions and I always have to preface this by saying I'm talking about Vladimir lennin not John Lennon um and lennin used to say that before revolution occurred everybody perceived that it was impossible uh but after it it's it succeeded people concluded of course it was inevitable and it's easy to look back and sort of say it was inevitable but you know I think that uh at least it was it was far from certain that it would turn out this way at least initially great thank you um Professor you maybe you could speak a little bit about the deliberations of the lifelong learning committee itself what was the thinking going in when you got the charge and how did the discussion develop over the course of the summer so um when uh Bob formed the committee uh the charge was necessarily both vague but very directional right where should we go vague in the sense you know how would education technology change the way MIT do education position itself and so on and so forth but other than that there really were not any other directions right because you don't usually form a committee and tell them what the answer you want to hear right so you just say go figure out and so um the committee worked very hard and basically we were at that time of course looking at our peers right people who are ahead uh the charge broadly talk about could we do some form of Education to people who are not on campus you know reaching out to alumni satisfying um some both professional and perhaps sort of uh interest driven educational demand and so forth and the committee basically was um coming up with a an answer that if you think about it would not be very different from what everybody else had already done because that was the the model right and you know we started looking at if we were to offer courses what kind of courses um if we were to do certificates one this and on that and and so you can imagine that was the sort of the state of the the committee and I think the the key thought was I think I I want to Echo again uh Chuck's um earlier sort of a comment about not just the historical context cirer 19 uh cirker 2000 but but the historical context of MIT right there was a sort of a thought that you know MIT had been able to had a much broader impact and influence through its activities uh beyond what a lot of other people are doing right we we somehow were able to do little things that turn out to be very impactful and so I I think at some point uh the thought basically came down to is there is that all there is to life perhaps I was just entering you know midlife crisis or something you know this so this question is always on my mind right you know so we were ready to give out a report to to to to to Bob and Chu at that time that basically says we could do the following right and nothing out of the ordinary we could copy fathom.com and do this we could do that okay and I was ready to just sign off cuz the job's done and that was it and we have some economic models you could know but against that backdrop of what MIT could be I was very unhappy because it's no big deal I mean you know frankly we could have guessed that answer without doing any of the work right and so the question I think for the committee and for me personally was could we do something that's a little bit more exciting right I mean if we had gone in there and emulated one of our peers we might have been you know the top 15 in doing that kind of stuff entering maybe top 30 we we were not early uh uh uh movers at all in that in that domain which which means we would have lost maybe a little bit less money than they did and and and if we were doing it really really well with with our good act together we might have been you know within the top 10 after five or eight years right and the thought was we probably could do better than just being the top 10 after killing ourselves right so that was I think the the the the struggle right at the end of this report and it all happened very quickly and I think in hindsight we should give credit to to at that time my concern was as as Larry pointed out right with the faculty buying right uh another concern and and sorry with no disrespect with the leadership uh Buy in right would I get just kicked out of the office right dick clear your head you know stop drinking and come back okay right um frankly I mean I was very worried and so uh people why you sent Bob in run interference people talk about this very big folder you know this 5in folder it was the biggest folder that the coupe carried okay if it wasn't I would have added more stuff because the one thing I didn't want and Swit is sort of academic um suicide or academic death would be let's study it some more right so I thought like what and if you mention it I'll would say oh no that's chapter 4 in appendix 5 okay right so we kind of looked at it so there was a little bit of that but but in hindsight I think a lot of it had to do with with uh who many of us believe MIT um is or could be uh a sense of sort of dissatisfaction of just yet doing something which was probably more or less done uh it was based upon that kind of a vision and there was also I think um uh thanks to you know the help with consultants and so forth bu and others uh it was also a sort of a economic uh business model decision right we we actually did go through and one of the things I was very surprised was we thought I actually thought many of these other universities doing what they were doing they probably didn't do that economic study I I I I was surprised that they would invest millions of dollars without doing that and so in the back of my mind I keep thinking maybe we missed something and they saw but then you know I didn't see anything else right and that was it so so there was a bit of an economic business sort of decision but primarily it was thinking that the time is right that MIT could do something um and the rest as they say is you know was just getting it done Larry talked about how going to all the faculty and convincing them I remember one of the things that I thought there might be a catch was to look at different people that we would have to talk to so the question was what are the benefits and values to MIT from a from a senior Administration point of view right uh you know Bob had assured me the need for us to move forward in education technology uh would that help answer that question um what are the values to The Faculty right I mean are they not going to publish anymore what are the values to our students and then you go beyond what are the value to other universities uh other uh educational institutions um domestically internationally uh what might be the value to a to a foundation frankly and why would they right so so I remember this is a very surprising thing and and I remember trying to write a you know Page worth of bullets for each of these questions and it's very interesting because at the end I had a story I think to convince everybody right this is one of these ideas that I you know for each slide this is the faculty if they asked this we could say that right and they were not like okay let's let's not talk to this group because they wouldn't be able to to buy in right so it was very interesting it was one of these things where once we go through thinking about it it actually answer a lot of the questions that that had been on our mind whether very explicitly or in a very subtle way that has been been been we've been struggling so so that that was I think the at least my perspective of what transpired over the summer of 2000 and maybe mainly towards the end of the 2000 the last you know two three weeks of trying to wrap up that that report and study great great thank you um Professor mwa maybe we could get you to comment on what I think is one of the the more extraordinary aspects of The Proposal uh that Dr vest referred to earlier which was the commitment to publish all 2,000 uh of mit's courses I think it would have been one thing if if the proposal had been to publish you know 20 courses or 50 courses or something but the the proposal that came out of the committee was all 2000 uh you know uh when we proposed this to Chuck and Bob uh that we should give away the course materials from all our MIT courses we actually didn't know how many courses we taught you know we have to go back and count uh uh after the fact after we uh made the initial proposal so uh that's how excited we were and how uh immediate The Proposal sounded but then there are a lot of things that we had to do including counting the number of courses and we found out that we had 2,000 courses and that was a bit of a a surprise to us that boy we have a big work ahead of us um and so uh there a lot of concerns that came up uh as uh uh as we moved into the process of convincing The Faculty that uh this is a good idea we had a notion that this really fit with the core values of MIT okay I mean Chuck referred to this uh MIT in its mission statement says that MIT is here to generate preserve and disseminate knowledge uh and uh bring that to bear on the big challenges of the world that's what the mission statement says and uh and as faculty we we share that core value and open coare is another implementation of this and we were seeing as we talked to the faculty uh going into this that the faculty were talking in this way but uh you know we have a thousand faculty members and uh we had to uh we had to uh convince them and actually took quite bit of work um Hal and Dick and Steve lurman others uh spent uh I think almost six months uh in in small groups talking with faculty talking with students talking with staff uh to uh persuade but also to uh dissuade them from uh misunderstandings about uh about what this was uh that we are not giving away MIT education MIT education is much bigger than uh the course materials that we were proposing to give away and it was a mindset that we were asking of the faculty uh to to uh to have again tapping into what I really believe was this core value the MIT has always had from its founding 150 years ago one thing I uh I want to uh uh you know say um Chuck uh said that all good ideas come from The Faculty uh and Grassroots and that's correct and that good ideas will find a way to uh to get legs but you know there's a difference between having a good idea and having the will to uh to implement that idea and ocw was the first time that I saw a very clear uh manifestation of academic leadership uh in the form of Chuck in the form of uh Bob and in form of Larry okay uh you know uh we know that there there's a president at your institution uh but most of the time you don't see them you know you figure they in this mysterious s of secretive room uh doing whatever they do you suspect that they they drink from Real China as opposed to paper cups that we drink coffee from but for the most of the time you don't you don't see them and they're not visible to you ocw was uh one uh time when I saw academic leadership in a clear way and that really uh that really worked uh if it were not for Chuck and Bob and Larry taking the the leadership and bringing us know the will uh not just the desire which we had but the will to do that this uh I don't think that we would have been here today so great thank you thank you Professor aelson you were involved in a number of other uh open efforts around the time of The Proposal free software Foundation creative comment could you maybe build on Tim ary's comments earlier and and provide a little more context around openness at the time or or going forward yeah I prepared remarks and then what I want to do is rip them up because what I really want to do is Riff on what Tim said because it's made this incredible complicated picture in my head that has kind of three strands one is what we've been talking about with open course Weare and let me take a minute to just underline what what chera said people sort of talk about what a what a cool great idea open course where was but the reality is MIT is the kind of place where there are lots and lots of good ideas and what it takes is the actual leadership of the institution to make the idea happen What Chuck did is what you just saw him do which is to take that and put in the context of what's a university for what's MIT about what's mit's Mission Bob was just masterful in orchestrating how this whole thing was come to was was to come together and Larry who just about a half an hour ago said he didn't do anything did this amazing thing it was after I believe your your conversation with bu doen and we knew the funding was there and we were kind of ready to go and announce this thing Larry said no you may not do this until you have gone around and spoke to every department at MIT all 23 departments because this has to be an in initiative of the faculty and I think that was probably the crucial step in open course for so even today when we talk about ocw we talk about it as an initiative of the MIT faculty and Larry did that and it was amazingly important but let me just again get back to the general thing about openness there's an easy story that we can all tell in hindsight you heard Tim Craft it as uh we uh we we helped move the notion of what a university can do from away from uh in Tim's words internet one away from a a publishing model where the value is sitting in this material that the faculty make uh Bob Bob mentioned things like the posy Alliance and EC Cornell and Morningside Ventures and sitting in MIT we were getting all these approaches there are places like caliper learning and pensari and uh in fact the week we were going to announce ocw we got a visit from the executive director of fathom which was meant to be the the uh concentrating Market site for higher University educ ational materials and I remember Larry and I got a visit together and we were kind of kind of sitting there politely listening to this conversation saying well GE should we say anything that tomorrow we're about to announce MIT is about to give it away for free right R blow up her business model but that's in some sense an easy story because you heard Tim say you heard Tim say the uh the model by which this goes which is you go around and you figure out what you're really bad you figure out if you can disrupt that whole that whole ecology by commoditizing something and then you figure out how you go to the next place where the value is and I want to I worry a little bit that we're going to take the easy answer so we know the easy answer that we've moved from internet one to internet 2 we've heard we should modularize we should make things open in participatory and what I want to say is man that is so Tim O'Reilly 2004 we're beyond that what's the really gutsy thing we could do so it was gutsy in 2000 1999 when Dick thought about it on on his treadmill right that was a really gutsy move what's the equivalent gutsy move what's the gutsy move that fits with mit's Mission so there's another thing I want to drop I want to drop into this which is a book you all should read which is a book by Douglas Thomas and John cely Brown called the new culture of learning because you remember what Tim ended with is the real issue is what does ocw say about the future of the university and this new book by John has so many wonderful books by John has done he said look we are no longer in a publishing mode about learning we are no longer in a place where we confuse dissemination of information with knowledge and learning and the question is can we craft something not just in MIT but the whole Consortium all of us saying what are we really about well if you look at mit's Mission and uh you heard that said a couple of times right MIT is about the generation the generation of knowledge the dissemination of knowledge and the preservation of knowledge and I'm kind of wondering suppose we really put it on the line and said what we're going to try to commoditize right now is the generation of knowledge suppose this is no longer about publishing suppose we are talking about what all of us can do together for the benefit of humanity and actually creating new knowledge what would that be like is that an equivalently crazy idea to what ocw was in in 2201 anyway that's that's sort of what's what's going through head that sort of that challenge can we can we learn how to do that and uh just just as a bottom line it this links very much with how we're all thinking about the changing in MIT in fact John and I are going tonight tonight to a focus group of MIT undergraduates saying what do you think MIT could be like with all of these resources because they're the people who are going to tell us Professor you you want I just want to quickly comment I think uh I completely support the the what's already been said namely open course where is very much a reflection of uh the leadership and the vision and courage gutsiness in many ways of the senior Administration but one should not think of open courseware as a good idea and we're going to try to make MIT do it right it really is a reflection of in some sense the the DNA of MIT and it working out in an expression right and I I think it would be uh completely uh sort of a Omission on our part not to point out that open course whereare wouldn't have happened if overwhelming majority of MIT faculty did not sign on right and I just wanted to to say that so it the the way our colleagues think about education think about making a contribution were reflected in open coursework right I mean they could easily have said I'm busy why I do this it's not part of me right I have a book to write and so I think one of the things that I really think we should point out and we pause to say and is that the the open course where is very much a reflection of the the the DNA the vision the the way MIT faculty think they were obviously more concerned about making an impact uh getting what they do uh to be um beneficial to more people and so on and so forth then the little ni and dime stuff that you sometime get into when you talk to faculty and and I just was I wanted to chime in because I was you know reminded Larry uh idea about we should go talk to different groups and so forth and some of us were very concerned that these conversations would bring out the sort of the the negative right and it's a historical fact we have you know record of all these conversations overwhelmingly MIT faculty bought in to open course were all within those couple months when we went around and that was not something that if you didn't know MIT you could have guessed right you could have said this is going to be treacherous okay we we had very very few actually naysayers I mean countable maybe on two or three hands okay of people who actually thought it wasn't a great idea but the majority the the hundreds and hundreds of others were extremely supportive I just wanted to to put that point I think it's very important for us to put that yeah I I'd like to actually excuse me pick up on Dick's uh last comment and just add three little uh things to the flavor of the discuss here uh one is it's interesting of course there was some faculty reluctance and you've heard the kind of distributed leadership it took to be sure everybody had thought it through carefully but there were three concerns uh the one we all expected or at least I did was that people would be worried about their intellectual property and say I'm not going to play ball because I'm going to write a textbook and so forth and so on that ended up being in the noise level the two things that there was some serious faculty reluctance around I think Larry may have have mentioned one of them was this concern that we were going to take away resources in order to make this happen and in particular we had just at this time been fortunate to get this wonderful $10 million endowment from uh from uh Britain Alex daroff to fund exciting educational ideas in the faculty people were really worried we're going to do that but the other one to me is the most interesting there was a non-trivial amount of the faculty who properly said this is not using Cutting Edge technology you know this is kind of technologically mundane and we're afraid we're going to put stuff out there that is not going to look like it's really high quality and that to me was a very interesting debate because the whole Elegance of this idea was it used fairly simple technology uh but but as dick said these were really relatively modest number of outliers other two points very quickly what was really unique and I know that both the melan and hulet Foundations put great weight on this uh lots of people were putting up things on the web and and lots of individual departments or schools were it was the comprehensiveness literally nobody had come at this in what Larry always so well articulated there's one MIT here folks and neither you want the whole thing or you don't get it so a lot of the world expected to see a few physics courses and some we courses some computer science but it was that holistic view that's what the foundation saw that nobody else was doing and finally and uh relevant to both what Tim O'Reilly said and what what Hal just said I think most of us uh viewed this as something that was largely a tool for teachers that we were going to give teachers a way of formatting the education that they provided and of course we've since learned that uh that well over half of the users are actually self-learners but really wasn't designed for that purpose thank you thank you uh Dr b or perhaps Dr Brown um you know we've heard a lot about faculty by and getting faculty to participate and the importance of that but faculty aren't the only constituency certainly at a university and there were other constituencies of concern uh were there uh issues you faced in in bringing them along as well well you know one of the many reasons I thought that this was such a a terrific idea is that I think it was clear to most of us that our students expected to be able to access content over the web these were our MIT students students and they were in fact some were frustrated that more faculty had not in fact made their materials available um this way and so students were I think a natural constituency in favor of this uh because they were going to be able to have you know everything up there eventually for them uh whenever they wanted it so I think that you know I I don't recall any um push back on the student side at the at the time it did engender an interesting conversation though which I think was ultimately very helpful and that is um The Faculty spent a fair amount of time saying well you know once we make all of the content available for all of our courses um to anybody who wants it what then is the value added of the MIT residential experience and so I think it caused us to think even harder about that and that was at a time in which chuck had commissioned a sort of a searching look at the MIT undergraduate experience and I think that proved to be I mean one reinforced the other at least that was my recollection I I I I agree with Larry I there was a fair amount of noise that focused back on the Provo office and I think the president's office coming through from three constituencies one were the students alumni and parents about where we giving away what is an MIT education for free compared to the people who had earned it by coming to miip in the residential experience and it and it forced us into this articulation of what was the value of the residential experience of bringing all of these people together in a small place uh under a fair amount of light and pressure and heat uh that actually forms the MIT experience and uh I think was healthy I think there were people even as we launched that believed at that point in time we were moving down a road of commoditizing an MIT education what we thought of as an MIT education although we said that clearly wasn't what was going to happen at the end of this and it's interesting now a decade later about how the putting the content of those courses online has affected educationally uh education worldwide but I don't think anybody believes we've commoditized an MIT educ and you know going back to a comment that Chuck made earlier it was also very helpful to be able to point out to people that you know most of us grew up taking calculus from a textbook that George Thomas wrote um you know um we took physics from pssc physics okay that originated at MIT uh economics from a textbook that Paul Samson wrote that MIT had been in the business for generations of propagating materials um and sending them out into the world and that you could have access to those materials anytime you wanted that was not what an MIT education was but it did I I think it was actually very helpful that we had that conversation about what is it that's unique about the residential experience and it forced us to be able to articulate far more sharply than I think we otherwise might have have done to others as well as to ourselves what was the essence of an MIT education as opposed to MIT content if I remember Larry was quoted in the new New York Times is saying an MIT education is not a box full of books I just want to quickly add a thought which is s of in the same line uh the the idea that if we were to publish a lot of this material uh it would actually free up our faculty to really teach rather than transferring information from their notebook to the Blackboard and from the Blackboard to the students notebook which happens a lot and there were a few again outlier type comments and say what if students students don't come to my classes and that and of course that would be the case if all they were doing was copying uh from one place or the other but I think in the over looking back a bit it it did free up a lot of us to use the classroom and their interaction for much better uh purposes uh you know we we became much more creative about the time we have right uh doing new experiments of uh you know etc etc so I think I think this was U at in the beginning sort of a push back but it ended up to be an opportunity actually for us to do a lot of interesting things and just quickly I think I'm going to give let Bob uh there were many other constituents with similar concerns that at the end of the day looking back it turned out that those concerns would be there because it was something you knew and nobody knew what the implications are but many of the worries actually did not materialize right so I remember a conversation with our emissions director right and say gee you know these guys could got all our material our applications numbers would would decline right because you know people would say I don't need to come to MIT anymore I could you know look at and of course as you know it that never materialized it's quite the contrary in fact a lot of our high school students who before they came to MIT had already became familiar with the kind of uh rigor and excitement MIT would provide through open courseware so when when when you have an idea like this there usually a lot of reasons for concern or push back and but in hindsight many of them actually did not did not materialize at all right on maybe even on the contrary they they opened us up to do to good creative things and good things yeah well it's interesting re uh recalling those days and thinking about uh a number of us who went Department by Department with a canned PowerPoint presentation talking to the faculty about ocw and I remember one with a very distinguished uh uh faculty member uh very senior faculty member who was uh world renowned for what he taught uh had taught the same subject within MIT for about a quarter Century maybe a little longer and we go through the little dog and pony show and start taking questions and he stands up in the back of the room and says I am never doing this and he says I have the set of notes from which I teach the class and if I put them on the web I have no idea what I would do three hours a week and as far as I know he never did put his courses up on ocw I think the course was then taught by someone else who took his notes and put them up on the web but uh a much younger person uh but and we talked about this openly quietly among the people who were trying to lead this effort that there would be people that generationally would not connect with the impact of this on their own teaching style inside the institution but we believe this too shall pass there was another piece that I want to throw out here that was going on in MIT at the same time because I these two things did get connected MIT launched the Singapore MIT Alliance about the same time that the ocw discussions were starting and in the Singapore MIT Alliance we had started teaching for the very first time to a distance ed class simultaneously with the class at MIT the other room was in Singapore using video conferencing technology VJ Kumar remembers all of this uh teach Sim simulcast teaching live uh which at that point in 2001 was right at the edge of what the internet could do right at the edge of what we could do technologically and the whole discussion at that point there was a discussion was that an MIT education Could you actually using video conferencing technology live 12 at time zones apart actually teach and these were Master's level subjects and so there was a whole discussion going on and that was a faculty debate that roared for five or six years about whether that technology got enough classroom context enough interaction that you believe that you were having an MIT education so this is something that I think created ocw was part of this a very healthy debate about mit's place in the world uh in terms of facilitating higher education great great thank you well one of the parts of the the story I don't have to tell this audience about because you're all familiar with it is the fact that I I think much more quickly than anybody here expected MIT started to lose market share in the open courseware world the other universities around the world very rapidly began to join the movement uh to extend the concept of open course where and and to add their own courses to the point where today we're 2,000 out of the 15,000 or so courses that are out there um professor aawa you were probably as deeply involved as anybody in the spread of open course where in the in the early uh 2000s so would you share a little bit of that sure um so it's important to to point out and it's uh it's not such a well-known fact that from the very beginning in fact in that meeting where we first talked about the idea of open coare indicus meeting we also said that if this idea uh takes shape and MIT uh wouldn't it be nice if other institutions will embrace the same idea and so from the very beginning the seed was planted for open coare to go beyond MIT and I remember I think it was in 2003 that we uh made the first attempt to uh call some of our uh neighbor institutions uh to MIT to show them what we were doing tfts was an early adopter and uh uh and we began the uh the Journey uh and uh I we weren't sure that it would uh it would succeed because it was outside of MIT we had never done anything like that and really took the will desire and will of people uh around uh around the world uh who saw the uh uh the advantage and the benefit and the attractiveness of this idea and to then translate it into your own uh Society to your own institution to your own culture uh and so I'm just uh quite frankly astounded at the the number of people who are here and remembering back to 2003 when I think there were five or six people in the room uh and we really didn't know whether it would succeed but you know wherever I went uh to Japan to Taiwan to Africa to Europe uh this idea I mean you you saw the same sort of Eureka uh as Chuck liked to say the idea of sharing uh is something that uh uh all of you uh understand at an intuitive level at an emotional level at intellectual level um and so uh there lots of challenges uh lots of challenges as we faced uh 10 years ago and as I hear from you uh but uh I think that uh the fact that now there 15,000 courses and MIT only has 2,000 of them is um it's a marvelous sign that open coare is now Beyond MIT I just real quickly I just want to say that this idea that it's not all about MIT but about um a bigger community of Institutions doing open course where was very much on our minds the at the very very beginning it was not an afterthought so to give you a sense there was a debate in the beginning what to call this thing and there were names like Under the Dome the infinite Corridor and so forth and uh I was among the people who pushed for a name that is not uh primarily reflecting something about MIT and uh someone reminded me that open course whereare at that time if you did the um alter Vista search excuse me uh it would have shown that open course were referred to like you know software that aids in the teaching of a class or something and we were pushing for something that's much more uh able to be uh used by other people without necessarily making a part of MIT so so finally I I had my way and we we we went in favor of names the name open courseware which is you know it doesn't mention the Dome infin theard or Cambridge or 77 Massa or anything like that and I remember also a conversation within this committee there were people who were more understanding of ips and so forth and say should we trademark the name and the answer was absolutely not okay we would trademark MIT or maybe it open courseware but open courseware as a name we would absolutely refuse to do that so so I just want to quickly point out that it was not something that I know after two three years we start thinking maybe we would spread it around it was very much at the beginning the idea that MIT is but one institution and a relatively small one at that we don't do many fields of disciplines um we're not we don't even do them not not necessarily we're good at them and and that the idea is that we could maybe provide a bit of an example early model and that many others would would join in and today I think today it's really gratifying to see that many others in fact have joined in and contributed perhaps in in mightier ways than than we could have ever imagined great um Dr backa perhaps you could comment you you uh left MIT right about the time that open course whereare was announced and moved over to tffs and so you've been involved in probably the most direct transplant of the open course sare concept uh so maybe you could comment a little bit on how uh it works in a different academic environment well it was um I was delighted to see when I got to tus that tus was already thinking along this lines um we had uh the university before I ever got there um had digitized its content in the Health Sciences um one of the problems traditionally of teaching for example medical students is that if you know medical students would um often have to go literally physically check out a group of slots to look at under a microscope and so years before I got to to TS um TS had looked at this problem and said you know we should just digitize all this content and it it had and it created a Content management system for it uh and not just for for medicine but for dental medicine for veterinary medicine we also have the only freestanding School of nutrition in the United States um at tus and this was it's now currently described as the tus University science science knowledge base and my colleagues who made this happen Mary Lee and Susan Albright and Robin McWilliams are all sitting in this room and so I discovered this when I came to toughs and it was like my God you know I I knew I'd come to the right place at least there were some people thinking along the same lines and so I said we should be one of the first institutions to join hands with MIT because what we we had already made a significant investment it was already there and by the way it was perfectly comp complimentary to the courses and the courseware that MIT had already uh put up on on ocw so it was it was really a very very easy decision um there was absolutely no issue persuading The Faculty because they had already you know gone through the effort um and the institution had already shared this information uh not with the whole world but with a number of Institutions who had expressed interest in it so you know I just tried not to screw things up um and and say yeah let's let's join hands and you know candidly also it was an opportunity for somebody who had literally been raised at MIT to maintain a little bit of a connection to an institution that I am still enormously fond of great great thank you um Professor Aon I was going to ask you sort of to to give your thoughts on the future direction of open corser but I think that was kind of the challenge you just just laid out for everybody is to is to think about the future Direction but do you have any closing comments or thoughts on on where we're headed or what might be next for for open courseware well I I think the the critical thing is thinking about open courseware and education together what the future of open course the future of the University how how all of this plays how all of this plays together if we're moving to a world that is more interactive more modular more participatory more about the generation of knowledge how do you construct a infrastructure that you can share with the world and have an impact on the world like open course for and at the same time pull that back into the university so one of the things that I remember when we were going around talking to the different departments uh went to one department and some faculty members stood up in the back room and she said this is great I'll be able to find out what the other people in this department are teaching you have to remember how far we've come that things aren't even shared across the university we now have that idea now the question is can we take this notion of particip participation can we take this notion of co-generation of knowledge and instill that first within the university and across the university and then across the world so that's how I think about the future great great thank you well I could continue asking questions for hours uh with this group but we do have a few minutes if there's anyone in the audience who would like to ask a question one up here you can see the people from all over the world to this conference it sent one message to everyone is the I think the whole world appreciate Dr West and MIT and then your decision definitely bring the what change the world education I think today is a from my knowledge here is all the open course are a synchronized and our College as is moving to synchronized open education that means realtime open education realtime open education and so my question is what is the future challenge do you see for the open education wow yeah um I mean I suppose I could comment from my perspective that what what I think that the uh people involved in open courseware did when they proposed open courseware was uh simplify the question of how to bring education to the Internet by only focusing on one aspect of Internet that the of Education the content that's used in supportive education there are also learning experiences that are created around education and assessment uh as well and the learning experiences and assessment are much more difficult uh problems to tackle than the question of uh just getting the content up and making it available and so I guess the the way that I would I would answer that is to say that now we're in a position to start looking at those other two challenges can we Foster interaction around the open content can we at assessment around open content does anyone have I'd like to make a comment in response it's it's not an answer but I'd like to say why I believe your question is really profoundly important um and and let me start here in the United States um as you know we're facing a lot of economic difficulties if you look across our public universities which educate most of the people post uh postsecondary in in this country uh there State support has dropped 24% in uh 10 years their charges for tuition room board fees has risen 50 some per in 10 years we're in an unsustainable system but then and that's in America if you look around the rest of the world there's some great news uh the desire and the ability to educate is rising all over the world I mean this is looking back 50 years from now this is going to be one of the things that will really stick out I believe historically the number of young people being educated to new heights so somehow we're going to have to deal with this scale and even though I happen to deeply believe in the role of the more or less traditional residential un unity in society there is no answer to this question that is not based on technology and so I am very hopeful while I don't know the answer and I suspect much of it is going to be along the lines of what how's saying that Computing and the internet and so forth become knowledge generators rather than stores and transmitters and picking up as Tim and so many other people have done about uh how we can sort of IC like engag people the Futures somewhere in this space but it's really important that bright people like this think about it very explicitly um I also think it's a great question uh it uh it's a question actually that I'm thinking about a lot these days because I just started collaborating with Bill Bowen on a research project in which we're taking a look at some of the obstacles that exist in incorporating interactive online online learning locally in large public research universities I think the rest of the world though has a real opportunity here because uh so many nations are making enormous Investments right now in higher education and part of the challenge that we have in this country is that we have a higher education system that has evolved um to and you might argue has been optimized in a world in which this kind of technology did not EX exist and one opportunity that exists in the rest of the world is to think about how as you expand opportunities in higher educ education to not just merely ape what we have done in the US and try to replicate the kinds of Institutions as good as they are in the US but to reconceptualize what the infrastructure looks like for higher education elsewhere that is in fact that that leap frog past what we're doing here because I think this evolution is going to take a long time before it it seriously penetrates um in in in US higher education and starts to fundamentally replace traditional models of of teaching and learning great I think we have time for one more yeah just to Qui could could you comment on the quality of instruction that uh the impact of this within the institution itself uh what has been the effect of open course were within MIT and toughs and so forth in terms of the learning within the institution um I don't think it within the my time in the in the University leadership there was a serious attempt to try to assess that that I left in 2005 um I'm and I don't know of one that's gone on since dick how can you do you know of one I think the honest answer is that we're trying a bunch of experiments and they're along the lines of modularity of things that say if there are if there are pieces of courses uh one example is differential equations that's on open course whereare can other courses take advantage of that material that's already that's already done there's a easier answer in terms of students who want to know should they take a course or should they major in in some particular in some particular field they can go look at the curriculum and do that their impacts on the advisers but the one thing that hasn't happened is I don't think open corer has transformed MIT as much as it's transformed the world and that to me I think is the fun one of the fundamental challenges of open course Ro going forward