A New Model for Open Sharing: Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare Initiative Makes a Difference

I magine a fl edgling biology instructor at a university in the developing world. Heading into her fi rst semester of teaching, she is armed with nothing but her college degree, some old notebooks, and—if she is lucky—a late-edition textbook. Forging a curriculum that is both current and engaging for her students could be a daunting challenge. But what if that same young instructor was given free and open access to a syllabus, complete lecture notes, and problem sets and solutions from two members of the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)? And not just any faculty members, but David Page—the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship in 1986, a Searle Scholar's Award in 1989, and the Amory Prize for advances in reproductive biology from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997—and Chris Kaiser, who won a 1999 fellowship from MIT that recognizes his teaching excellence? This is the premise of MIT's OpenCourseWare project. Utilizing the Internet, MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) has opened MIT's curriculum and educational materials to a global audience of teachers and learners—an instructor at a new engineering university in Ghana, a precocious high-school biology student in suburban Chicago, a political scientist in Poland, Citation: Margulies A H (2004) A new model for open sharing: Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare initiative makes a difference. PLoS Biol 2(8): e200. open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.