Announced over ten years ago, OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where its course materials are made available online, for free. Certainly not the same as taking MIT courses on campus, or virtually, but OCW has cemented MIT’s reputation as a leader in open access higher education.
That gap between what you can learn on campus and what you can learn online is now shrinking. MIT just announced a program (currently called MITx) where you can now take online courses, again, for free (H/T The Boston Globe). However, if you wish to pay a fee, you can get a formal grade and certificate from MIT acknowledging your participation and performance.
The program will be prototyped in the spring, and expand once MIT is confident in the robustness of the online platforms intended to make delivering course material and grading student progress manageable and reliable. At that point, MIT will also release the course tools in open source format and available for all.
Besides the boost to the MIT brand, this program offers advantages to students of all ages in and beyond Cambridge, Massachusetts. A greater flexibility in course delivery and additional scheduling options will help students obtain knowledge (and degrees) in less time and (probably) less money.
The losers? People who still think tenure track academic jobs will be there when they get their Ph.Ds (or finish those postdocs).
