Since 2001, MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) has been creating new opportunities for millions of learners and educators, sharing Open Educational Resources (OER) from MIT and helping to lead a global revolution in free access to knowledge. MIT OpenCourseWare continues to build on this foundation with a new web platform, ever-growing content, and collaborations across the vibrant open education ecosystem, creating a world of more equitable and inclusive education for all. MIT OpenCourseWare is a free and open collection of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum. Knowledge is your reward, with OCW available to guide your own life-long learning or to teach others, while MIT does not offer credit or certification to users of OCW and asks for nothing in return. There is no enrollment or registration—users can freely browse and use OCW materials at their own pace with no signup and no start or end dates. The materials are made for sharing: users can download files for later, send to friends and colleagues, and modify, remix, and reuse (just remember to cite OCW as the source). Over its first 20 years, OCW has unlocked access to knowledge, helped launch the global OER movement, and opened MIT’s full curriculum to the world. The new platform brings mobile users fully into OCW’s global community, provides more powerful and insightful ways to discover content, and keeps OCW a vibrant and current reflection of MIT’s world-changing teaching and learning.
Why it matters: MIT OpenCourseWare demonstrates that one of the world’s leading research universities can freely share its entire curriculum—thousands of courses—with millions of learners worldwide, asking for nothing in return and offering knowledge itself as the reward. By creating materials made for sharing that can be downloaded, modified, remixed, and reused without enrollment, registration, or time constraints, MIT OCW helped launch the global Open Educational Resources movement, proving that equitable access to world-class education requires removing traditional barriers of cost, admission, and geography. The platform’s 20-year evolution and continued growth, with a new platform bringing mobile users into the global community, shows that creating more equitable and inclusive education for all demands sustained institutional commitment to free access to knowledge as a fundamental principle rather than a temporary experiment.
