Jeff Millman: The open university

In 1740, several Philadelphians sought to open minds by acts of the heart. At the corner of 4th and Arch streets, they decided to erect a hall for "the instruction of poor children." This building, then the largest in the city, was the original site of the University. Their charity was the genesis of Penn.

Today, that promise has translated into the instruction of mostly rich children. Our hefty tuition provides us with an educational advantage, including articulate, expert faculty, access to technology and discovery through research. What we've got here is great. But there is a growing gap between us and those not fortunate enough to be here.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is bridging that gap. MIT is launching Open Course Ware, an initiative to provide almost all undergraduate and graduate course materials free online to any user in the world. On Monday, the lecture notes, syllabi, assignments, texts and Java applications for 30 MIT classes will be available on its Web site. 2000 MIT courses will be represented online in five years.

OCW could be a key domestic education initiative. Ninety percent of American young people have completed high school, many of them with important basic computer skills. But only 60 percent of them attend college. Those who do not lose out on the knowledge and the $19,200 more in average income that college graduates receive.

OCW will not grant degrees, but it will give Web-based tutorials on Java. It will give community college students 750 picture slides on Islamic architecture. It will give freshmen in Hill House access to 37 streaming videos of linear algebra lectures. OCW will give the registered, the enterprising and the curious what Jon Potts, a spokesman for the school, describes as "a peek inside the walls of MIT."

Providing the very best of research and teaching free of charge and easily accessible to everyone is a baby step in the American-led parade of globalization. Universities in this country have long been a vehicle for democracy -- through the teaching of hard sciences and market economics to the third world's elite and creating leaders. The former presidents of Nigeria, Panama and Ghana, and prime ministers of the Ivory Coast and the Philippines, have Penn degrees. Now, the global common folk can access the ideas that form the blueprint for social mobility and modernity. Intellectual empowerment is a human right; it should not be C.O.D.

OCW is in many ways the educational equivalent of the open source software movement involving programmers worldwide. It provides sharp contrast to the current trend of entrepreneurial education, practiced not just at for-profit institutions you see advertised on day-time television, like DeVry and ITT Tech. Penn Library Director Paul Mosher says that universities around the world are "guarding plots of knowledge," the proprietary empires of what they discover and teach. Mosher says the MIT initiative is "noble" because it does not "fence in and charge by the plot." Penn charges $1,828 for one credit in its PennAdvance distance learning program.

OCW is futuristic proof that Penn's origin is relevant and viable. Penn needs to join MIT to break the academic model that Mosher describes as "the most advanced form of traditional anarchy on earth." The first step to embracing charity is to be a free-rider. Professors and students should supplement their own course materials with OCW, learn from it and report its bugs.

The next step is to contribute. Penn has the humanities and the diverse graduate programs to add what MIT cannot. Penn's School of Medicine already records most of its lectures on video. Give these to doctors in Rwanda. Huntsman Hall's technologically advanced classrooms offer video records at the touch of a button. Give these to small businesses in Blairsville, Pa. Open Blackboard, our Web-based coursework software, to the public.

In spite of MIT's strong support and desire to see OCW flourish, its success is far from guaranteed. Professors have egos: their genius is not necessarily for mass consumption. What's more, their intellectual property may be jeopardized.

Students are no dupes either: we won't want to shell out $120,000 if Penn's courses are widely distributed -- for free, no less.

But an OCW-like initiative would not cheapen Penn. Students would still have exclusive access to faculty, research opportunity, the college experience and a killer degree.

As scholars, we share our knowledge with others, provided they share with us. Widening access to this community is fair, progressive and the obligation of the privileged.

As MIT clearly recognizes, scholarship is about openness and the free movement of ideas. Expanding access to knowledge is the obligation of the privileged who have it.

Jeff Millman is a senior Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major from Los Angeles, Calif.

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