Top Universities reach the world with Online Service

The Globe and Mail recently reported on an initiative called OpenCourseWare lead by MIT and other top U.S. schools, such as Stanford and Berkeley. This is a great example of using internet technology to increase the power of an organizations offering.

You may be wondering, why would MIT, or the other 100 universities worldwide, give away all this course material for free, how is that a worthwhile offering? (You still actually need to go to MIT to get a degree – that cannot be done online)

Here is my take:

Awareness & Trial: Placing valuable content online will drive a huge number of people to the MIT site and allow them to get a taste of the quality of the education. This will likely result in much larger and global audience with significantly more impact than any advertisement could. Only internet technology has the power to enable a program with this much reach.

Prestige: MIT and others are in the business of prestige. They need to be at the forefront of knowledge, recruiting the best professors, only taking the best students, and making sure everyone knows they are the best. By broadening the audience of a professor from a lecture hall to the world, these universities will be able to empower their professors to make an even bigger impact and garner more prestige. This might even result in better teaching if reputations start being made off of courses and not just research/publications.

Furthermore, many of the users of these materials are professors and students at other institutions, who are adapting their teaching/courses to the MIT material. This is a huge compliment that only increases the allure of MIT. (If properly cited – of course)

Usability will be critical: For both the end user and the professor/administrator an easy to use system will be critical. For the end-user it is straightforward, if you can’t easily understand and navigate through the material then the experience will degrade, not enhance, the perception of the university.

For professors/administrators the time spent maintaining the courseware catalogue could be a significant cost in terms of time and distraction if it’s not designed to fit well with how these staff members operate.

There are many content management systems out there that could theoretically “do the job”, after all it’s just posting text, documents, and video to a website … right? Not quite. To create a system that really hits the mark and makes it easy for both the users and professors, they will need to develop a custom system. That’s why in Stanford’s Open CouseWare Business plan they call for a custom web application, and Berkeley is focusing on an automated system to record and post lectures.

Globe&Mail Article