Jasjit’s Cyberoughts

In 2001 when Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started the open courseware (OCW) project, Anne Margulies, the project director would not have dreamt of the kind of response the project received and the difference it is poised to make for the institution and the students & educators spread across the world.

OCW project is a free publication of course materials used at MIT. At OCW website:

1. Get lecture notes, problem sets, labs and more.

2. Watch lecture videos and demonstrations.

3. Study a wide variety of subjects.

The site statistics show that 40 million visitors have visited OCW website 52 million times till February 8, 2008. 8% or 3.2 million of these visitors were from the Indian Sub Continent. This underlines the popularity of the program for students and educators alike.

The program is extremely popular among self learners and students who form 81% of the audience as shown by the pie chart below:

The program was launched in 2001 through an announcement in The New York Times. By 2002, material on 50 courses was available online. Since then, this number has swelled to 1800 courses and MIT plans to make information available for 200 courses every year, 2008 onwards.

The program, if utilized well by Indian education institutes and teachers has the potential to bring about a lot of improvement in the quality of education imparted across the country. The MIT material available can be used by the educators to augment existing syllabus and to bring it in line with what is taught across leading schools in the world.

Teachers can use this material to prepare their classes and improve their lectures. Students having access to the Internet will have ready references for respective courses and their areas of Interest.

The biggest advantage of an initiative like OCW is that, a lot of Institutes in India may start similar projects. This will benefit education and training institutes in remote and backward areas, where, access to information and latest teaching aids may be limited. Such projects like all open source projects will enable knowledgeable and talented people across the country to contribute new learning material and improve existing learning resources thus potentially bringing Indian education at par with the world’s best faster than any government or private initiative.

Benchmarking courses against world class courseware like that of MIT will also go a long way in building confidence of local students.

Who knows, someday such initiatives may play a decisive role in improving the employability of Indian graduates, which is a major area of concern at present.

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