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Unintended Consequences of MIT's Open Course Initiative
12/10/2003
Ann noted that they're seeing some of what they'd hoped for from outside MIT already happening from the inside - a kind of "peer review" of curricula. It seems that "publication" of what is not really a textbook and is certainly not a replacement for actually taking a class or interacting with a professor, might lead to the kind of "continuous improvement" in curricular evolution that is characteristic of total quality management (TQM).
In an opinion for this newsletter back in August, Architecture for the Transparent University, philosophy professor G. Randolph Mayes of California State University, Sacramento, wrote: "The informational privacy of the traditional classroom could be regarded as an accidental feature of its brick and mortar construction, not something essential to learning. We are raising the consciousness of old classrooms by installing the neural architecture necessary to access and display the contents of computer files located anywhere on earth. Why stop there? If we can give our classrooms eyes to see out, we can give them eyes to see in as well."
Well, the eyes are "seeing in" now - at least into the MIT curricula. And within its own faculty, it seems as though sharing with the larger world has prompted other colleagues to share and share alike. Hopefully, as more of the curricula from MIT get evolved and adapted by other faculty, with feedback, and as other institutions join in the sharing, we may be getting some of what Mayes was asking for. As I noted then, it seems like many aspects of the transparent university are inevitable.
Note: Now that MIT has more than 500 courses up and lots of people are using
OCI, the commentary and testimonials are flying. It's worth a look at its primary
Web site to catch up with the fast pace of what's being learned from this brave
initiative: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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