Curricular Reform, Conspiracy, and Philanthropy
Curriculum reform is no small undertaking. The process involves time, people,
significant resources, and lots of good will. Assessment is also important,
as are leadership and money.
A little over a decade ago the National Science Foundation launched an ambitious
effort to reform undergraduate engineering education. The grant competition
was constructed in a way that no single university could get any of the millions
of dollars NSF had allocated for this project. Rather, the project specs required
collaborative efforts. Institutions formed partnerships, initially to develop
the proposals and, if funded by NSF, to work on developing a “new”
curriculum for undergraduate engineering education.
Of course, given institutional and departmental egos, the partnership process
was complex. For example, the rational observer might think that regional consortia—Big
Ten campuses or universities in New England—could have found a way to
collaborate on these projects. In theory California institutions—the University
of California campuses, along with Caltech, the Cal State institutions, and
USC—would have made an ideal consortium and could have prepared a very
competitive proposal.
One would think. The final proposals reflected complex institutional alliances
that crossed regions and time zones. The California universities aligned themselves
with institutions elsewhere in the country: UC-Berkeley, UCLA, and USC were
each involved in separate proposals.
I got to watch some of this up close and personal, as my research at the time
included work on the talent pipeline in science and engineering. However, my
research has moved in other directions over the past decade, so I don’t
know what happened with the NSF undergraduate engineering projects. Given the
millions that NSF and the winning bidders were going to spend on these initiatives,
I would like to think these projects led to significant change.
The NSF undergraduate engineering initiative comes to mind in the context
of MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative (www.ocw.mit.edu). Launched with
much fanfare in 2001 during the waning months of the dot com era, OCW reflects
MIT's thoughtful decision to pursue a different path. Then (as now) other institutions
(and institutional officials) saw fortune in online education. MIT’s assessment
was different: the public story is that after much study (and lots of courting
from potential corporate partners) MIT officials were not convinced that there
really was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of online education.
The OCW announcement, almost three years ago, was open for easy inference.
MIT officials insisted that the university was not offering online courses to
students; rather, MIT faculty were putting their course materials—syllabi
and supporting resources—on the Web for others to use. In other words,
one could see the syllabus and review some of the course materials, but not
take the class.
And not just a few classes. OCW’s announced goal is to make the complete
MIT curriculum—everything in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum,
across all fields, totalling some 2000 courses—available over the next
few years. Speaking at the November 2003 EDUCAUSE Conference, Anne Margulies,
executive director of the OCW project, announced that MIT has made significant
progress towards this goal: as of fall 2003, the resources for some 500 MIT
courses had been posted on the Web.
I’ll confess that like many, I was not sure what to make of the initial
OCW announcement. It was clear that MIT was not offering courses or certification,
just course outlines and some course content. MIT officials seemed adamant that
the OCW audience was not students.
So let’s assume (or at least infer) that OCW’s target audience
is really faculty. If so, why all the public fuss about what some observers
have tagged as MIT’s $100 million investment in OCW?
After all, many faculty have willingly shared syllabi and course materials
with their colleagues at other institutions. More recently, some professors
have used the Internet to review (and even poach) course outlines and supporting
content posted on the Web. On the other hand, do faculty at Caltech, Ohio State,
or Purdue really want or need MIT’s version of introductory or advanced
courses casting a public shadow over their own syllabi?
However, a conversation on a recent trip to Australia helped me see OCW in
a new context. Faculty at several universities in Australia told me that prospective
students in selected science and engineering majors are now asking if these
programs use the MIT curriculum. Interestingly, the queries have been addressed
to professors at some of the “Sandstone” institutions (Australia’s
oldest and elite universities, their version of the Ivy league).
So now, following the conversations in Australia, I began to wonder: Is OCW
a carefully-crafted curriculum conspiracy—MIT’s effort to drive
and dominate science and engineering curricula across the globe? By opting not
to offer online courses, has MIT found a smarter, better, more creative way
to protect and expand its “brand” against other universities, in
the US and elsewhere, offering online courses, certificates, and degrees? Will
“teaching the MIT curriculum” become a new measure of implied or
inferred program quality? Will U.S. News and World Report begin to rate science
and engineering programs on the effective implementation of MIT courses and
the MIT cirriculum?
Admittedly, these are whimsical and rhetorical questions. MIT’s $100
million investment in OCW far surpasses the money NSF allocated for the undergraduate
engineering initiative a decade ago. But assisted by a clear vision and hopefully
unburdened by the politics and process of faculty committees, OCW may have far
greater reach and impact than many past and current NSF curricular initiatives,
particularly in developing nations.
Indeed, is it too much hyperbole to think that MIT’s OCW initiative
will be a catalyst for curricular reform in science and engineering education,
in the US and elsewhere? Maybe so.
Is there a risk that OCW could foster a homogenized curriculum? Possibly.
Time will tell.
And what happens when money begins to matter? Content, supported by infrastructure,
is king on the Internet. OCW provides infrastructure for the content of MIT
courses. What happens when the data begin to reveal demand, and demand curves
provide a way to extrapolate dollars?
All interesting questions. But in the interim, credit MIT for choosing the
road not taken. In her presentation at the 2003 EDUCAUSE Conference (available
as a video archive www.educause.edu/conference/annual/2003/resources.asp), Anne
Margulies described OCW as intellectual philanthropy—MIT’s gift
to higher education across the globe. In the p'et’s words, that road not
taken—opting for intellectual philanthropy over potential profit—may
make all the difference.
