MIT OpenCourseWare Turns 10: What's Next for Open Education?

April will mark the 10th 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 even a selection of video lectures from over MIT 2,000 courses.

Over the past decade, MIT has shared its course materials with over100 million individuals, and MIT OCW is laying out an ambitious roadmap for the next decade, with the goal of expanding its reach ten-fold: "to reach a billion minds."

Although it's becoming commonplace now to talk about online educational opportunities, distance learning, and YouTube lectures. the creation of MIT OpenCourseWare in April 2001 was a bold move. (You can read The New York Times story here.) The MIT faculty agreed to make their course content available online, in the spirit of openness and collaboration. Initially the expectations were that the resources would be utilized by other teachers and scholars. But the creation of the MIT OpenCourseWare program gave a strong boost to the global opencourseware movement.