In 1999, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty gathered to consider how they could use the Internet to advance knowledge and educate students around the world in science and technology.
The result was an ambitious plan – make the institute's course materials, including syllabi, lecture notes and exams, freely available online for a global audience.
Two years later, a pilot project called the MIT Open Courseware debuted with 50 courses. A year later, the project formally launched with 500 courses. Today, MIT Open Courseware features nearly every course offered by the institute – about 1,800 in all....
More than 90 per cent of MIT's faculty voluntarily participates in the program....
MIT Open Courseware attracts over 2 million visits each month....
What started with just MIT has grown into a consortium of dozens of universities from around the world that has published 5,000 courses in many different languages....
The sole Canadian participant in the Open Courseware consortium is Capilano College, a relatively small school with 6,700 students located in North Vancouver, B.C. The rest of Canadian higher education – Toronto, York, UBC, Western, Alberta, Queen's, Ottawa, McGill, Dalhousie, Waterloo and dozens more – are inexplicably missing in action....
Canadians pride themselves in being one of the world's most connected countries; however, the failure to lead on issues such as the Open Courseware consortium and open access to the results of Canadian research suggests that we are still struggling to identify how to fully leverage the benefits to education of new technology and the Internet.
Many of Canada's top universities may liken themselves to MIT, but the near-total absence of Canada from the Open Courseware consortium suggests that there is still much to learn.\
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
