Tim O'Reilly On What OpenCourseWare Can Learn From the Open Source Movement

This week the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of opencourseware. The movement to make university-level content freely and openly available online began a decade ago, when the faculty at MIT agreed to put the course materials from all 2000 of the university's courses on the Web.

With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described today as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: "the traditional of the global intellectual commons."

The opening keynote at today's OCW Consortium meeting was Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO ofO'Reilly Media, who spoke on "Perspectives on Open" and on what opencourseware and open education can learn from the open source movement.