Science Business and MIT OpenCourseWare

There has been an attempt made by the MIT to make their lectures available to the wider audience for free. The project is called MIT OpenCourseWare. It includes about 1900 course materials.

The site presents the core academic content–including lecture notes, syllabi, assignments and exams–from substantially all of MIT's undergraduate and graduate curriculum freely and openly to support formal and informal learning around the world.

Each course published on the MIT site require an average of 100 hours of effort to produce.

While the MIT faculty devote 5-10 hours of their own time for each course, it would be impossible for them to produce OCW courses alone. In order to publish materials from 200 courses each year while minimizing impact on MIT faculty time, OCW maintains a publication staff of twelve people who work directly with the faculty to collect and compile course materials, ensure proper licensing for open sharing, and format materials for our site. We also employ two intellectual property staff and four production staff who support our publication team.

The project is funded partly by the university itself and partly by the sponsors. The annual cost to make the courses available online is 3,5 million dollars.

Although it could be argued that this is MIT-s long range marketing trick to make their university name virally spread (its the degree that counts these days - not what you know - so you still need to attend to some university to get the degree ) , on the other hand it is a generous project that makes education available to the global audience and reduces the digital divide.

And there are contributions made by the faculty members to produce these materials. These lectures cost thousands of USD just some years ago, now they are available for free.