All MIT courses to be available on the Web, for free

By Anand Parthasarathy

KOCHI, APRIL 6. In a move that is bound to impact the scope and reach of online learning efforts in many nations, including India, a respected American teaching institution - the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - has decided to place the content of all its courses in the public domain.

A new Internet-based facility to be called MIT OpenCourseWare, which will be online later this year, will allow browsers to access free of charge, lecture notes, course content, reading lists and assignments for all courses taught at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based institution. Within two years this is expected to cover 500 courses - and within a decade MIT's entire curriculum totalling 2,000 courses, will be freely accessible.

While this will not enable individual users to earn a degree, the MIT has no objection if institutions around the world structure their courses around this material. ``Courseware'' is the most guarded property of any techno-educational system - and MIT's largesse will cost it $ 7-10 million, a year in operating costs alone.

Indian student users who visit many of the burgeoning educational sites on the Net, usually find that only `sample' course material is free: if one wants to take a full course particularly in the popular computers-and-communications disciplines, the charge can vary from Rs. 1,000 to Rs. 10,000. Both NIIT and Aptech the two biggest IT trainers, have launched Net-based learning - netvarsity.com and onlinevarsity.com - but charge students who want to take the courses offered. New Web startups, usually provide free solved papers for popular entrance tests and school leaving exams - but coaching for these exams come, at a cost. MIT's `free for all' policy will inevitably impact the commercial models of these current Web-learning sites - particularly in view of the global reputation of MIT's courses. ``We want to change the way the Web is used in higher education,'' Dr. Charles M. Vest, MIT's president, said yesterday.

Initiatives in India

In recent months MIT launched a number of initiatives aimed at passing on the benefits of technology, across the ``digital divide'' to the world's underprivileged. MIT's Media Lab is currently exploring the scope in India for two initiatives - `Digital Nation' and `Designs that matter' - which aim at addressing grassroots problems with hightech tools. Dr. Barry Vercoe, Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT Media Lab, visited India late last year to initiate a collaboration with Indian NGOs and other grassroots agencies. MIT is currently examining a ``technology wish list'' generated by Dr. Shrinath Kalbag of the Vigyan Ashram at Pabal, near Pune which includes, an electronic three-phase fuse for rural power supply units; an electronic fence for preventing cattle from straying; an alarm that will tell farmers when the water table in a well is low and a simple test to tell sour milk from good.

During his visit to Kerala last year, Dr. Vercoe told this correspondent that among the socially relevant tasks being pursued at MIT was the work of Dr. Deb Roy, Director, Cognitive Machines, who is attempting to create a multilingual automatic translator toolkit - leading to `talking books' for those who cannot read. A PhD student, Mr. Nitin Sawhney, is currently anchoring a special course started a few weeks ago at MIT Media Lab, where students work on such `designs that matter' with NGOs in India and other developing nations and then attempt to find corporate funding to bring the designs to fruition.

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