Taking a course at MIT — for free

Internet access can break down the knowledge barrier.

SCRIPPS HOWARD

You may not have the grades, the money or even the means to get to a physics class with one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s best lecturers.

But if you have an Internet connection anywhere in the world, you can watch a video of the Dutch-born physics professor, Walter Lewin, swinging on a cable across the front of a lecture hall in his Classical Mechanics course to demonstrate that weight doesn’t affect the time it takes a pendulum to complete a cycle of motion.

And you can do this for free.

Six years ago, MIT began breaking down the knowledge barrier by announcing it would make materials from its courses available free on the Internet.

Later this month, MIT will celebrate reaching its goal of having written portions, at least, of 1,800 courses — virtually the entire course catalog, including materials from about 90 percent of its professors — available free on its Web site.

“MIT used to be an ivory tower, like the Forbidden City in China,” said Lewin. Now, he said, the public can see inside. “I think it’s a wonderful thing. They get, by and large, very high-quality stuff.”

MIT’s initiative has ignited a trend that has made course materials from universities around the world available for free on school Web sites or on consortium sites like YouTube and iTunes U, a service of Apple Computer.

The materials are known as “open courseware” or, more broadly, “open educational resources.”

MIT’s initial vision was that the courses would be viewed by other university instructors in hopes of improving teaching worldwide. But only 16 percent of users are educators. Nearly a third are students from other schools, and about half are self-learners.

“It came as a surprise to us there are so many self-learners out there. It wasn’t intended to be distance learning,” said Steve Carson, external relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare

Of the students, about 44 percent say they use it to complement a course they’re already taking, while others say they are enhancing their personal knowledge or planning what they’d like to take.

Self-learner Rogelio Morales, 34, of Caracas, Venezuela, has been using the MIT site for more than two years and has tried five courses, including vision science, the design of ocean systems and the brain and cognitive sciences.

Morales is a metallurgical engineer and commercial diver who does underwater inspections.

From his MIT open-courseware experience, he became involved in research and has presented that research at conferences. Now, he has an invitation from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts to participate in a three-month guest-student program in underwater imaging.

While using open courseware is free, making it is not.

MIT spends $4 million a year on it.

Efforts are being made to decrease the cost of providing the materials, including using free software developed at Utah State University to make the process of posting the materials easier.

“If we don’t crack the sustainability nut, we’ll be yesterday’s fad,” said John Dehlin, director of the Open Courseware Consortium, a collaboration of more than 100 schools in 20-plus countries.

However, open courseware doesn’t appear to be a fading fad.

College professors already routinely share research at conferences, in professional journals and through collaborations.