All 1,800 of Massachusetts Institute of Technology courses will be available online for free, as the project that began in fall 2003 nears completion this year.

The online project, officially Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare, is an online tool that displays all lecture notes, previous exams and study materials offered to MIT students for anyone to access, unlike Vanderbilt's Online Access to Knowledge, which is restricted to Vanderbilt students.

"We hoped that it would be useful," said Steve Carson, an external relations officer for MIT OCW. "The whole point was an act of intellectual philanthropy. We've been overwhelmed with the response it has gotten. We're getting about 2 million visits per month."

Carson said it all began with a faculty discussion about how the Internet would affect education at MIT.
"They thought about (and said), ‘Well, we're good at residential education, the Internet is good at distributing content, so why don't we distribute our content on the Internet?'" Carson said.

"Over the past couple of years, we've been really surprised at the general use. Fifteen percent are faculty users, 30 (percent) are users at other institutions, and half are self-learners and are professionals in their fields, young kids, retirees. It has a wider appeal than we first imagined."

MIT has also been pitching the idea to other universities, both nationally and globally.

"We've also been working with other institutions that are developing open-courseware projects," Carson said. "There are big groups in Spain, Japan, China, but we've got some in South America as well. Right now, we represent about half the open-courseware content on the Web."
"Johns Hopkins, Yale, Notre Dame, Tufts, UC-Irvine, Utah State University, all these guys have come on board in recent years."

Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs Mike Schoenfeld said OCW is just one of the many things Vanderbilt is examining in terms of intellectual expansion.

"It's one of many things we're looking at to extend the intellectual resources and capabilities beyond our borders," Schoenfeld said.

Many factors would need to be considered before undertaking such a project, Schoenfeld said.

"It's a very complex thing," Schoenfeld said. "What MIT has done is very large and very ambitious. There are a lot of aspects to it that would be thoroughly checked with individual faculty members (regarding) whether or not they want to put it online."

"Also, equally important is that we believe that education - a Vanderbilt education - is centered on the campus, and what we would do wouldn't replace a classroom experience but instead supplement."