How MIT's OpenCourseWare Will Change E-Learning
By William J. Salter

MIT's OpenCourseWare project will make virtually all of the school's course content available free on the Internet--and will transform the e-learning industry. In this new e-learning space, companies can add value by increasing interaction; tailoring, assembling, and re-purposing content; becoming certification authorities; innovating with technology; and innovating with pedagogy.

On April 4, 2001, MIT President Charles M. Vest announced the establishment of MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), an ambitious 10-year project to make almost all MIT course materials available on the Internet free of charge. The news merited a front-page story in that day's New York Times. Strikingly bold in its scope and simplicity, this initiative promises to have major effects on education in general and e-learning in particular.

Vest is not worried that OCW will give away MIT's crown jewels. He said at the press conference announcing OCW, "Let me be clear: We are not providing a MIT education on the Web. We are providing our core materials that are the infrastructure that undergirds an MIT education. Real education requires interaction." Those interactions--the added value that differentiates the MIT education, Vest believes--can range from professors' office hours to dorm study groups, from conversations with more advanced students to comments written by instructors on papers and problem sets.

Nor is Vest concerned that OCW will dilute the value of MIT's brand; quite the reverse, in fact. He said: "I am absolutely confident that providing this worldwide window [into] an MIT education, showing what we teach, [will] be a very good thing for attracting prospective students."

In June 2001, MIT announced US$11 million in funding--evenly split between the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation--to cover OCW's first two years. The institution hired an executive director for the program in April of this year and will be placing materials from about 100 courses online this September. By September 2003, the OCW team hopes to have material from 500 courses available.

The effects

The OCW initiative may greatly affect other colleges and universities, for-profit e-learning suppliers, and other deliverers of education worldwide. The existence of OCW means that other leading institutions will feel pressure either to imitate MIT or to develop alternative approaches, and market-driven companies will have to move well beyond mere content to differentiate themselves. The effects on e-learning may include

Reduced "content bottleneck." MIT will make 500 courses available within two years. On the one hand, social conscience and prestige will motivate colleges and universities to imitate MIT and make materials available for free; on the other hand, market logic will drive some to find ways to compete and to leverage their own content into revenue-generating activities. MIT will allow unrestricted non-commercial use of their materials, but it's unlikely that the school will refuse to enter into any royalty-based or other for-profit agreements to use those materials. Indeed, the availability of such a vast body of high-quality content will place MIT in an excellent position, both to derive substantial revenues from it and to exercise considerable control in how it's used. Since the content bottleneck will quickly disappear, the e-learning industry will have to find other avenues to add value.

Growth of innovation. Since a great deal of quality content will be available, fewer resources will have to be allocated to developing it. More resources, therefore, can be devoted to delivery and innovation. In addition, competition for the enormous revenues to be had in the educational sector by those who can effectively add value--whatever business models eventually prove successful--will lead to rapid innovation in technology and pedagogy.

Increased turbulence and consolidation. Changes in the e-learning space will probably increase for the next year or two. Even before MIT's announcement, players in the e-learning industry were merging; others were reducing operations or redefining their business models. Certainly, organizations devoting substantial resources to content development will have to reassess their approaches. In addition, large enterprises (for example, IBM and Microsoft) may move into e-learning as the market settles down.

Exploding e-learning market. Demand will accelerate over the next three to five years, due to

• significant challenges in American secondary education
• the demands for skills and knowledge across the globe as knowledge work sheds the boundaries of physical space
• the increasing requirements for ever-more up-to-date and specialized knowledge
• the corporate emphasis on reducing travel for both security and financial reasons.

The pedagogical value chain

The Web contains a vast amount of information but also has a high degree of entropy, or disorder. It takes human energy and often considerable knowledge to find needed content: Students who research on the Web often spend huge amounts of time finding marginally relevant or accurate resources. A reading list for a course represents a marked decrease in entropy, since it reflects a professor's informed selection and sequencing of relevant materials. Adding assignments, exercises, lecture notes, and topic outlines reduces entropy further.

Reducing entropy in information takes time to select and organize content, and, more important, to develop the mastery that enables the structuring. So, clearly, the materials to be made available via OCW represent an enormous store of value provided free to the world. Updating that content--which MIT is committed to--will continue to add value, as professors incorporate the latest research findings and pedagogy. Participation of other educational institutions will make additional high-quality raw content available.

How to add value

Five ways the e-learning industry can add value to the MIT content:

Increase interaction. Since effective education requires interaction, increasing interaction will be a core approach to adding value. That can take many forms. It's easy to imagine colleges and universities using the newly available materials as the central content of classroom-based courses. Professors and teaching assistants can explain the content in more detail, lead discussions based on it, assign papers and exercises incorporating it, and so forth. (This blending of Web-based and classroom-based education is already occurring on campuses worldwide.) Faculty will be able to pay more attention to teaching rather than developing content.

Computer-assisted forms of interaction are another way to add value. Courses can be delivered over the Web or via intranets with mechanisms that support synchronous or asynchronous interaction with professors, teaching assistants, other students, and so forth. This is the current default model of e-learning in higher education. That model will expand, making a wide variety of types of interactions available, tailored to different audiences, purposes, and revenue models.

Also, purely computer-based interaction methods will proliferate; these offer potentially great cost savings (since humans must be paid for their time) and convenience (since computers never take time off). Such methods also offer vast potential for enhanced pedagogy, and will undoubtedly be an area of intensive research and development. Simulations, for example, can engage learners in complex, meaningful tasks, providing access to information as needed and enabling learners to explore the consequences of different choices or actions. We can be confident that powerful innovations to support computer-based interaction will be developed and deployed, though we can't predict the nature of those innovations in detail.

Tailor, assemble, and repurpose content. Most learners are not like MIT students, 99 percent of whom graduated in the top 20 percent of their high school class. So even for college courses, MIT content will have to be modified--reduced in scope and complexity. Lifelong learners interested in Renaissance history, advances in genetics, or macroeconomic policy will bring different backgrounds and goals to their learning and will need content tailored for their needs. Ongoing professional education drives another set of needs.

One can therefore envision OCW, and offerings by other colleges and universities, as providing chunks of content that can be organized and modified in myriad ways to address the requirements of the widely varied groups that might want to participate in e-learning. A major segment of the e-learning industry will therefore be devoted to such tailoring and repurposing.

Perhaps MIT and other colleges and universities will be active in this area, driven by the financial rewards, the opportunities to disseminate knowledge and thereby address social needs, and the desire to retain control over their own material. A variety of independent, for-profit e-learning consolidators will emerge as well. Offerings will range from individual courses to entire degree programs, from as-is offerings to high-value-added custom-designed programs.

Major efforts expended in reassembling existing content will drive the development of methods and technologies for doing so, such as advanced learning management systems and standards for learning objects. That will spur technological innovation. It seems safe to predict that a wide range of offerings will become available, using a variety of business models and tapping an enormous market.

Become certification authorities. With the proliferation of e-learning opportunities, the number of online certifications or degrees will increase. Although Vest was clear that OCW would not make a MIT degree available online, other colleges and universities will (and do) offer certifications and degrees online; more will once they've resolved issues of quality control. One can even imagine a two-tiered approach for elite colleges and universities, analogous to the method used by the makers of top French Bordeaux: If you can't afford Chateau Lafite, perhaps you will buy Carraudes de Lafite, their "second bottling." Harvard University has already taken this approach: the Harvard Extension School offers open admission; anyone can enroll. Many courses are not taught by Harvard professors, and students must petition for special student status to take regular Harvard University classes.

In addition to colleges and universities, for-profits will flock to the certification arena as well, often working with professional associations to develop programs.

Innovate with technology. Some innovations in e-learning will be driven by developments in other industries; others, developed originally to address e-learning needs, will spread beyond the field. Some of the technologies already being used effectively in computer-based games may be directly applicable to e-learning--see "Game-Based E-Learning Gets Real." That may attract powerful companies such as Sony into e-learning.

A number of companies now offer learning management systems (LMSs); the movement to develop standards is closely related. The basic thrust of both LMSs and standards activities is to develop common mechanisms and definitions (called an ontology) of meaningful units in e-learning. Such units--often referred to as learning objects--can then be combined, managed, replaced when needed, and so forth. (See "[Learning] Objects of Desire").

Effective LMSs and widely used standards are necessary to facilitate the spread of e-learning. These elements are required for content to be reassembled and re-purposed, for courses from multiple suppliers to be combined into a single degree or credential, for people to compare courses or programs, for niche suppliers to offer specialized products or services that can be combined with a range of existing offerings, and so forth. LMSs and standards will provide the infrastructure for a broad-based, open e-learning environment.

Other technological innovations will advance the art of rich content. A number of applications now make it possible to link videos, text, graphics, and interactive activities, but these are still relatively primitive. Innovations in this area will probably address two yoked issues: purposive linkage and dynamic integration.

Purposive linkage means that linkages between content items are based on pedagogical goals--driven by insights into teaching; learning; and diagnosing learner errors, misconceptions, learning styles, and the like. Currently, rich content is almost always user-driven; that is, users of systems can play a video, hear a piece of music, run a model, and so forth, when they choose to do so. However, learners will not always know what they should do; purposive linkages will enable the system to initiate various modes or media, sometimes based on general principles, sometimes on the performance of a specific learner.

Dynamic integration will provide the computational infrastructure to bring together diverse forms of content seamlessly, automatically accessing videos, complex simulations, large databases, collaborative tools, and so forth, without interrupting the flow of learning.

Innovate with pedagogy. Methods for more accurate diagnosis and remediation of learners are still rudimentary and offer considerable opportunity for pedagogical advances. Techniques to accommodate different learning styles, including but by no means limited to disabilities, offer another fertile area for development. This will be enhanced by advances in dynamic assessment as an integral part of learning.

Old-fashioned drill and practice will remain necessary for areas of learning that require mastery of facts, such as art history, organic chemistry, or anatomy. Methods will be developed to facilitate such learning using computers and to integrate it with more conceptual and problem-solving aspects of the material to be mastered.

Another area ripe for development is collaboration and cooperative learning. Computer-based tools that support collaboration have found a huge market in business; the application of collaboration to e-learning, however, is still in its infancy. This will include multi-person simulations as well as project-based learning, and probably other approaches that have not been imagined yet.

Pedagogical advances will require considerable research and development. Although there is some risk that most r&d will be technology-driven, I am confident that significant investment will be made in pedagogical r&d, both because the payoffs can be huge and because the challenges are so interesting. OCW will fuel extensive r&d at MIT; that is one of its explicit goals. One can hope that many other institutions, perhaps encouraged by enhanced federal funding, will also devote substantial resources to r&d. The financial and social payoffs will be enormous.

A shift in perspective: the long view

Education, of course, is a critical factor to growth in the gross domestic product (GDP). And GDP can grow faster in less developed economies than in more developed ones, essentially because a less developed economy has a steeper part of the learning curve ahead of it. So we can expect substantial positive effects on global economic development with the advent of OCW. Advancing the development of educational institutions in less developed countries is one of the program's explicit goals.

Common access to educational resources will unquestionably accelerate integration of the global economy. Necessary skills will be more widely available around the world, and a growing body of common knowledge will help to unite disparate cultures. One can even hope that the broad availability of such educational resources will reduce the flow of top students out of less developed countries to pursue higher education, and thus may contribute both to economic development and to the countries retaining cultural uniqueness.

On the other hand, the United States's leading export is U.S. culture--movies and television shows, McDonald's, and Coca-Cola. However one feels about that, we should expect that the export of knowledge will enhance US competitiveness and will increase global business opportunities.

US education is characterized by a great paradox: While the country attracts top students from around the world, standard public education is acknowledged to be in crisis, with secondary students underperforming their peers in most industrialized countries. The accelerated development of post-secondary e-learning will filter down into secondary education, building on both the content made available and, more important, on the technological, pedagogical, and organizational innovations that will undoubtedly follow in its wake.

Finally, and most speculatively, knowledge is said to make us free. And the increasingly integrated global economy is the most powerful force for global political development. Thus, rapid diffusion of knowledge, and concomitant economic development, may even help to reduce political conflicts between and within countries.

Published: June 2002