This IAE Blog entry is motivated by the following article:

Watters, Audrey (5/18/2011). 10 Ways Open CourseWare Has Freed Education. Retrieved 7/13/2011 from http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/04/10-ways-open-courseware-has-freed-education/.

Quoting from the article:

This month marks the tenth anniversary of MIT OpenCourseWare, the university’s initiative to provide free and open access to its core academic content — the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and event video lectures from over 2000 MIT course.

The decision by the MIT faculty in 2001 to allow anyone to use their course content was a seminal move, one that had a profound effect on democratizing education. (You can read the original New York Times story here.) Since then, over 100 million people have accessed MIT’s materials. [Bold added for emphasis.]

Our formal education system is built on a foundation of academic credit and credentialing. Our informal education system is built on a foundation of: “I need or want to know and I don’t need academic credits or a credential.” What Open CourseWare does is help bridge the gap between formal and informal education.

The MIT work and the work of many other educational institutions helps brings transparency to formal education. Both students and other institutions can peruse MIT’s courses and see the standards they set. This is a useful step toward self-assessment that can be done by an individual or an academic institution.

The article contains some interesting statistics. It indicates that less than 1% of those who access the university’s content are actually doing so from MIT. Almost 60% of those visitors to the site are outside the U.S.

Notice the worldwide access. This is part of the evidence that the world is growing smaller. People from throughout the world can now compete for certain types of jobs—especially those jobs that require a high quality education. Since MIT is one of the world’s leading technology-oriented research universities, it helps to define world standards for those that want to compete in the worldwide market.

The Internet and Open CourseWare make possible a new type of learning experience in which students from throughout the collaborate in learning together. See Make the World Your Study Group at  http://openstudy.com/. Registration is free. Quoting from that Website:

OpenStudy is a social learning network where students ask questions, give help, and connect with other students studying the same things. Our mission is to make the world one large study group, regardless of school, location, or background.

Final Remarks

Our system of formal academic credits and credentialing remains very important. However, Open CourseWare is an important vehicle to aid in lifelong continuing education outside of our formal education system.

As a child I read The World of Null-A (usually written The World of ?) a 1948 science fiction novel by A. E. van Vogt. In this novel, a key idea is an artificially intelligent computer system that tests people to determine their capabilities. We are certainly a long way from having such a computer system, and it is not clear that we want to have such a system. However, I find it interesting to think about the consequences of partially supplanting our current formal education system with a really good assessment system. Hmm. Now that would be REALLY HIGH STAKES TESTING!