Don't like your Physics class? With just a few strokes of your keyboard, you can try MIT's.
More and more, universities are putting materials from their courses online for public access.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the most prominent figure in this field, plans to have all 18,000-plus of its courses available online for free by November. And Yale University, the University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington, among others, all offer a portion of their courses available for free, including videos of lectures, syllabi, presentation slides and exams.
"What is the Internet good at? The distribution of content widely and freely," said Steve Carson, a spokesman for MIT's OpenCourseWare program (Ocw.mit.edu). "So why not use the internet to distribute classroom materials widely and freely?"
But the benefits of OpenCourseWare are not all philanthropic - it has also helped encourage college applicants to look more closely at MIT, Carson said.
Based on a survey at MIT, one third of the 2005 freshman class were aware of the OCW program, and, of that third, one third said that it affected their decision to attend.
With OpenCourseWare, "students have a better idea of what they're purchasing," Carson said.
MIT OpenCourseWare was an initiative proposed in 1999 by a faculty committee that had been charged with determining what MIT would do to react to the emergence of the Internet. The pilot site launched in 2002.
OpenCourseWare "is growing into a global movement right now," Carson said. "We have schools all over the world that are publishing OpenCourseWare materials."
Since its creation, The Open SourceWare Consortium of schools that offer OCW materials has grown to claim over 100 members in 17 countries.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has thus far provided MIT with $14.5 million in funding towards its OCW program through its Open Education Resources program.
"There's a whole group of people who are uneducated because they don't have access to educational resources," said Catherine Casserly, program officer for Education at the Hewlett Foundation. "We don't see [Open Education Resources] replacing the traditional system. Let's see if we can improve it; let's see if we can innovate."
Penn, however, has no formal mechanism for publishing its courses online, though many professors do maintain Web sites with course content on an individual basis.
And at the Penn Library, there are two projects that aim to make information more freely available.
John Ockerbloom maintains a directory of free books called The Online Books Page (Onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu), where he provides an index of over 25,000 free texts.
"Part of the Penn Compact is engaging not just with people locally, but globally as well, and increasing access to the knowledge and resources that Penn has available," Ockerbloom said.
The Online Books Page gets over a million hits a month, and Ockerbloom gets e-mail from people all over the world with feedback, he said.
"Someone wrote me from Pakistan last week, thanking me for providing a link to George Orwell's 1984," Ockerbloom said.
The Penn Library also runs a repository of selected scholarly articles by some Penn faculty and graduate students called the Scholarly Commons@Penn.
While MIT, with its strong technical background and many professors associated with the Open Source Software movement, was the first university to adopt the free and open ethos, Carson says that they would love to see every university do so.
Casserly has a similar attitude. "Knowledge is a public good, and when something is a public good, it should be freely available," he said. "We would love to see Penn involved."
The Provost's Office was not available for comment.
