Issue 25, Fall 2003

William A. McEachern, Editor

MIT for Free!

In September 2002, MIT began offering free online access to materials for some of its courses. The project began with 32 courses in 17 disciplines, but the plan calls for covering 500 courses this fall and most of MIT's two thousand courses by 2006-2007. It has been a hit around the world, with site visitors from 210 countries and territories. Students, faculty, and other interested learners are using OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html), as it's called, to supplement courses, prepare course material, or just to see what an MIT education involves. Canada and Germany are the most frequent country sources of site hits outside the United States (China likely would have ranked first, but it denied its citizens access to OpenCourseWare until February 2003).

The most popular course is "Problems of Philosophy." I can see why. Course materials are well organized with online notes offered for each of the 22 lectures. Each lecture has an intriguing title such as "Evil and Free Will," "Moral Luck," and "Egoism." Eighteen economics courses were among those available online as of mid-September 2003. This amounts to about one third of the economics courses listed in the MIT catalogue. Principles of Macroeconomics is one of the online courses, but the material is disappointing. There are only two sets of lecture notes and they focus mostly on stocks, bonds, and interest rates, with a little IS-LM analysis—timely topics, no question, but macro is obviously much more. Students already think economics is mostly about stocks and bonds, so this material will reinforce that misconception. There also are some sloppy errors, such as saying stocks when bonds were the apparent intent, and referring to the Price/Dividend ratio in the notes, but the Dividend/Price ratio in the charts.

As you know, making course materials available online is not new. Nearly a decade ago, the World Lecture Hall began offering course links submitted by faculty from around the country (www.utexas.edu/world/lecture). I gave this site a mixed review seven years ago in The Teaching Economist ("Reality Bites," Issue 12, Fall 1996, http://www.swlearning.com/economics/mceachern/economist.html). There are now only 48 links to economics courses, and one third of these links are either dead or password protected. There were 63 links three years ago. This is little presence given the thousands of economics courses offered around the country.

Much broader coverage of online course materials is found at Syllabus Finder (http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi), a search tool offered by George Mason University's Center for History and New Media. About 200,000 syllabi are at the Center's site, and 500,000 are accessible using a customized Google search engine that targets syllabi. Both are driven by key words you chose. For example, "Mark Kurlansky salt" links to two syllabi where the Salt book appears (at Brown and Bryn Mawr). "Behavioral economics" shows up on 1,060 syllabi, "economics" on 30,500, and "plagiarism" on 46,700. Plug in a favorite term and/or name (your own?) and see what turns up.

What's new about the MIT project is that a major institution would try to offer online material across the board for free. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, MIT made its decision only after a consultant concluded there was no market for selling course materials online. The MIT project was funded by the Mellon and Hewlett Foundations. The estimated cost of the seven-year effort is $100 million. To make OpenCourseWare more accessible around the world, online materials for 25 courses became available in Spanish and Portuguese in September 2003. Carnegie Mellon and Princeton Universities are also working on making course materials more widely available.

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