2021: The Next 20 Years
Since 2001, MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) has worked to share the best educational resources from MIT freely and openly, creating remarkable new opportunities for millions of learners and educators around the world.
While OCW prepares to honor the MIT faculty, learners, and contributors who have helped shape these first two decades, we are already looking to further unlock knowledge and empower minds for the next 20 years. To better serve the needs of today’s learners and better leverage today’s technologies and open education ecosystem, we will launch NextGen OCW, a more accessible, mobile-friendly platform, later this year.
You can help us create the next generation of OCW with a gift today.
-
A Community of Open
"MIT has been my middle school, my high school, my entire education."
Ahaan Rungta
Student, USA
-
A Community of Open
"I immediately said that really sounded like an MIT thing, not only doing it but making it available free. That’s something I can really support."
Gene Stark ‘68, SM ‘69, ScD ‘72
OCW supporter, USA
-
A Community of Open
"Studying in a country where there are political issues going on, such as strikes, drone attacks, target killing, etc., it’s very difficult to study. But thanks to OCW, now I do not have to worry about keeping [up] with the competing world."
Tooba Siddiqui
Student, Pakistan
-
A Community of Open
"OCW gives rare and high-level knowledge explained in a simple way."
Akwir Alain
Self Learner, Democratic Republic of the Congo
-
A Community of Open
"Your program really helped me to realize that I was still able to do the same quality of work as I did before the aneurysm and brain surgery."
Anita Moreno
Self Learner, USA
-
A Community of Open
"OCW provides a chance for the students to get an idea of how it would be when studying abroad."
Kian Wah Liew
Malaysia
Learn More About OCW
2021-
2016-2020
- The world turns to OCW during COVID-19 pandemic, with traffic to the OCW website nearly doubling in April 2020
- More than 2,500 OCW courses and resources on the website, and over 6,000 videos on OCW’s YouTube channel, have supported 500 million visits and 5 billion minutes of learning
- Chalk Radio podcast is launched in February 2020.
- With over 2.5 million subscribers, OCW is the largest .edu channel on YouTube
- New MIT Open Learning Library launched in 2019, offers new self-paced learning options complementing OCW and MITx
- 200th Instructor Insights published through the OCW Educator program
- Added interactive, searchable transcripts to videos
2011-2015
- In 2015, more than 432,000 people like or follow OCW on Facebook and Twitter
- 2,300 course published, including 100 with complete video lectures and 50 with open online textbooks
- OCW website exceeds 1 Billion page views and 200 million lifetime visits
- MIT faculty on OCW Educator: Sharing the "How" as well as the "What" of MIT Education
- OCW Educator is launched in 2013 to share MIT faculty insights on how they teach
- Turkish course translations and Korean video translations added
- In 2013, MIT's new Office of Digital Learning brings together OCW, MITx and other resources. [The Office of Digital Learning is now part of MIT Open Learning.]
- MIT's Ongoing Commitment to OpenCourseWare
- OCW and Highlights for High School websites are redesigned in 2012 for better user experience (before, after)
- MIT launches MITx online courses, creating new learning experiences expanding its commitment to free global learning and complementing OCW’s open course materials
- OCW Scholar courses, designed for independent learners, are launched in 2011
- OCW celebrates a Decade of Open Sharing in 2011. Reflections on opening up OpenCourseWare.
2006-2010
- OCW website exceeds 100 Million lifetime visits
- 2000 courses published
- 225 OCW mirror sites around the world
- 1 million lifetime visits to OCW Highlights for High School.
- 1 million lifetime website visits from the MIT community.
- Audio/Video content added regularly to YouTube and iTunesU starting in 2008
- In 2007, OCW achieves its original goal to represent MIT’s complete curriculum, with over 1,800 courses (view celebration video and site on Internet Archive)
- New monthly website traffic record: over 2 million visits in 2007
- OCW Highlights for High School launched in 2006
2001-2005
- OCW wins over a dozen major awards in 2005
- OpenCourseWare Consortium formed in 2005 [renamed the Open Education Consortium in 2014, and OE Global Consortium in 2020].
- An update on OCW: Beyond Anecdotes
- OCW adopts Creative Commons license in 2004
- First mirror site established in Africa
- OCW officially launches in 2003 with 500 courses (view site on Internet Archive)
- First language translations by affiliates, in Spanish and Portuguese.
- A paper on The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT
- First 50 courses published in 2002 (view site on Internet Archive)
- OCW Announced in The New York Times - Watch the press conference announcing MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW).
The impact of OCW can be best described by the thousands of learners who use OCW every day. We welcome you to read a compilation of some of the inspirational feedback we've received over the years.
