MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare is an initiative of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The goal is to put materials from all of their classes online and make it available to students and non-students alike. The site does not just post syllabi, but also videos from course lectures, quizzes, exams, and answer sheets. A non-student may complete all the work that a paid student would complete and can receive the same information, but the non-student does not have access to the professors, nor do they receive course credit or a degree.

Collection Principles
The university's goal is to put all class content online by 2008. According to the site, "MIT OCW provides users with open access to the syllabi, lecture notes, course calendars, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, even a selection of video lectures, from 1550 MIT courses representing 34 departments and all five of MIT's schools."

Object Characteristics

The content of the course I downloaded was pretty standard. (Intro to Women's Studies) I am still unsure why I downloaded the files as it seems that each one I open just leads me to a URL. I was hoping to find images of primary documents or photographs in the folder, but have yet to find anything of the sort. Many of the readings are linked to the full text. It simply looks like an online course syllabus and nothing more.

Metadata

The amount of metadata on this site is remarkable. Not only are items tagged with LC classification numbers, but the site has an entire page devoted to explaining what types of technology were used to create the site, the design infrastructure and the creative and proprietary flow of material from instructor to web. It even has a section entitled "metadata."

Audience
In case the audience was not completely clear. MIT OCW created a minute long advertisement for the program with testimonials from two people who benefitted from the program. The first was a father in a rural area without a library who, along with his wife, homeschools their children. The two adults have been using the MIT OCW online courses to gather content and create lessons for their children. The other testimonial is from a young woman at a public university that does not offer all the courses she needs and she accesses content through MIT OCW. This project was featured on a recent episode of Marketplace from American Public Media. In the broadcast, MIT student's were asked their opinion of the program with one student objecting because he felt that his ideas were an essential part of the class and that others should not be given access to them. It seems that he was specifically referring to online lectures.