Other universities may be striving to market their courses to the Internet masses in hopes of dot-com wealth. But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has chosen the opposite path: to post virtually all its course materials on the Web, free to everybody, MIT announced on Wednesday.
A press release on the MIT web page said that the website for the project—MIT OpenCourseWare—would include material such as lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, and assignments for each course. Over the next decade, the project expects to provide materials for over 2,000 courses across MIT's entire curriculum—in architecture and planning, engineering, humanities, arts, social sciences, management, and science.
Professors' participation will be voluntary, but the university is committing itself to post sites for all its courses, at a cost of up to $100 million.
Visitors will not earn college credits, said the statement.
The giveaway idea, President Charles M. Vest of MIT said, came in a "traditional Eureka moment" as the institute - like nearly every other university - brainstormed and soul-searched about how best to take advantage of the Internet.
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