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HAL ABELSON: There's this consistent vision.

MIT has asked itself in the words of T.S. Eliot:

"Do I dare disturb the universe?"

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And the consistent thing about MIT,

is MIT has been willing to say yes.

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CHUCK VEST: Thank you all for joining us here today.

As President of MIT, I've come to expect top level,

innovative and intellectually entrepreneurial ideas

from the MIT community.

SANJAY SARMA: Today, the word democratize seems very cliched.

We invented that with knowledge

and I think it's a profound thing.

CHUCK VEST: We went into this expecting that something creative

and cutting edge and challenging would emerge.

Something that would be consistent with MIT's mission.

But I must admit that OpenCourseWare is not exactly

what I had expected.

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HAL ABELSON: This idea started in 1999, 2000,

and people would say,

there's this thing called the internet,

what is MIT going to do about it?

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DICK YUE: It was sort of a feeding frenzy on the possibilities

of profiting from knowledge.

HAL ABELSON: The prevailing idea then was this is a gold mine

for universities to publish their stuff and market it.

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Part of the response

was to create this educational technology council.

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DICK YUE: The proposal on the table

was that MIT could enter into the space

by offering small modules,

packaged as maybe at that time a CD or some medium like that.

Whether it could go beyond that, we weren't sure.

And the financial model conclusion was,

it wouldn't work unless we do it at some scale.

And at the end of the day,

it's really not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The question was what can we do

that really reflects MIT's values of leadership,

of impact, of excellence?

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HAL ABELSON: The key person really was Dick Yue.

He's the one who really had the initial idea.

DICK YUE: I know exactly where I was.

I was at home, what I was doing,

my wife remembered where I was us.

HAL ABELSON: He was getting some food out

of his refrigerator thinking about all of this,

and suddenly it occurred to him saying,

why don't we just give it away?

INTERVIEWERS: I've heard it different ways.

Hal told us the story

and I don't know if it's the right story.

DICK YUE: I was on the exercise bike at home.

I think I was on the exercise bike.

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Just came to my mind, how about we make something big

and we give it away?

It sounded crazy 'cause nobody did that.

That was where OpenCourseWare came about,

that we would give it away.

We won't make a dime, but we would get impact.

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CHUCK VEST: OpenCourseWare is a web-based program

that will provide free access to primary materials

for virtually every course at MIT.

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CEC D'OLIVEIRA: I remember hearing about OpenCourseWare

when it first got announced,

and we were like, yes, this is so right.

This is so much what MIT is about.

ANNE MARGULIES: It literally almost took my breath away.

I thought it was stunning.

CEC D'OLIVEIRA: No one was open licensing content at that point in time,

let alone full courses.

It was breakthrough thinking in a lot of different ways.

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HAL ABELSON: It was a pretty long time of, gee, making sure

there's real, real, real support from the faculty,

and a lot of hearing, you know, both enthusiasm

and just a lot of skepticism.

- Zero.

HAL ABELSON: If students can go get this stuff on the web,

why do they need to come get a university education?

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SANJAY SARMA: People said, oh, my God,

you're giving your crown jewels away.

And many said, no, we're not.

Because what is our crown jewel is thinking, it's reasoning,

it's creating new knowledge.

The knowledge itself should be made available.

I mean, the sheer wisdom

of that is pretty incredible actually.

CEC D'OLIVEIRA: We have institutions like MIT

and they can only serve a limited population.

But if you can take the things that are fundamental

to how a faculty member here teaches,

many, many, many other students can be affected.

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ESTHER DUFLO: The first time ever that my in Intro

to Development class was put on OCW,

I think that very first year I taught more student

than I had ever taught before.

SARA BEERY: We taught this course

on advanced graduate level deep learning.

In just two months, hundreds of thousands of people engaged

with the content online.

The fact that something that we worked so hard to build

can spread so far beyond these institutions doors,

I think is amazing.

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ANNE MARGULIES: We were able to grow in terms of courses very steadily,

but it was one course at a time.

One faculty member at a time.

Growth though in terms of users was exponential.

CURT NEWTON: The OCW YouTube channel

with its 6 million subscribers

is the most subscribed YouTube channel

from any .edu out there.

So an indication

of just the kind of global hunger for knowledge.

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TOMAS BORQUEZ SANCHEZ: (in Spanish) At 17, this is when I found the MIT OCW content...

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HAL ABELSON: It's about empowering people

to actually use this technology to improve their lives

and improve the world.

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SOFIA LIPKEVYCH: I first came upon OCW when I was about 14 years old.

I'm originally from Ukraine,

and when the war started,

I was trying to find an opportunity

to learn more beyond high school curriculum.

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I think I started with calculus one.

My English wasn't that good back in the day,

but I was trying to grasp

what the professor was drawing on the board.

PROFESSOR: And that is just one over 1 over 101.

SOFIA LIPKEVYCH: Then as I learned English more,

I became a big user of the platform.

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EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: I remember my first interaction

with this I was looking up something on YouTube

and then I see results of an AI class in MIT,

and I remember asking myself, which MIT is this?

This can't be the MIT.

Why would they give this out for free?

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SOFIA LIPKEVYCH: OCW became this stepping stone,

and right now I'm a first year student here

and I'm deeply grateful for that.

EMMANUEL KASIGAZI: If you can inform someone

and give them that knowledge,

and help them make better decisions as people,

multiply that factor a thousand times

and you know you're building a better world, in my opinion.

HAL ABELSON: It's not only us putting out stuff

that other people can use for free.

It's to encourage other people to improve and build on it.

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ELIZABETH SILER: One of the cool things about using MIT's OCW

is being able to go in there and use what works

or using it as a starting point

and then adding a bunch of examples.

[class lecture] If somebody gets more, the other person has to get less,

So we could use them in a way that actually makes sense

to the things my students need to know.

SOFIA LIPKEVYCH: Me and a few other students,

we got this idea that we can translate OCW materials

into first Ukrainian and then maybe other languages.

They were really welcoming for us

to translate their materials.

[class lecture] It's always good to ask how could it fail.

SOFIA LIPKEVYCH: For most of the courses we've done,

it's caption translation,

but also there is one specific course

where we translated audio and you can turn on the toggle

and Professor Kanwisher will speak Ukrainian.

- (speaking Ukranian)

SOFIA LIPKEVYCH: It maintains her natural pace,

her tone, and it's very fascinating.

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CURT NEWTON: Our most popular courses tend to be in calculus

and physics and learning to program.

[class lecture] Let's look at what this code's supposed to do.

CURT NEWTON: But a vitally important part of the education at MIT

is the integration of other disciplines

across the social sciences,

humanities, and the arts.

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People might not realize that there's a pretty vibrant set

of physical education experiences reflected

on OpenCourseWare, such as videos,

about scuba diving and archery.

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ANNE MARGULIES: President Vest's vision was always that OpenCourseWare

would be a permanent part of MIT.

And for that to happen,

we had to make sure that it delivered real value to MIT.

ESTHER DUFLO: One of the ways in which we are using

the OpenCourseWare material

is as part of flipped classroom.

Students who listen to the video at home,

and when they come to class,

my students do case studies.

So OpenCourseWare material

is used as very, very, very, very rich textbook in a way.

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DIMITRIS BERTSIMAS: I work with many PhD students,

and every year, two or three of my students

would not be at MIT if it wasn't for OCW.

They learned linear algebra, quantum mechanics

and so forth, increasing their aspirations

to proceed further in science and technology.

So in addition to helping people, it also helped MIT

because it definitely attracted people

that would ordinarily not be here.

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SANJAY SARMA: It's a face that launched a thousand ships.

A lot of later online efforts look back to OpenCourseWare

and say, that was the model.

SAL KHAN: OpenCourseWare was a big part of my thinking of like,

well, you know, what if MIT could stand on this principle

that certain things should just be free

and available to the world,

I wanna stand for that same principle.

So there's a direct through line

from what MIT did with OpenCourseWare

to the existence of Khan Academy.

SARA BEERY: This is also maybe my origin story

with open education

because when I was going to start going to college,

you know, in my early twenties, I, you know,

six years not thinking about math at all.

Like I didn't remember anything.

I didn't remember how to add fractions,

and so I actually very heavily used things like Khan Academy

to kind of get me back up to speed.

And for someone who was kind of taking

this not straightforward path, it was vital.

PAUL BREST: OCW was a pioneer

in making educational resources available to the public.

The whole open education resources movement

has led to thousands of open textbooks

and many, many open courses that are available on the web.

ELIZABETH SILER: I've been teaching

with almost exclusively open education resources

for like 10 years now.

It's really made me think about some things differently

because you know, education is a human right.

Everybody has a right to learn,

not just people who can afford to pay for it.

TOMAS BORQUEZ SANCHEZ: (in Spanish) I think the discourse of democratizing...

SAL KHAN: If we democratize education,

we will have those future geniuses

who can push society forward.

DIMITRIS BERTSIMAS: I envision the future

where we combine multimodal data in a more global way,

in languages that are not only English, but multiple others.

[class lecture] Is what we call speed.

DIMITRIS BERTSIMAS: Having a trusted source like OpenCourseWare

is critical for the future.

And we at MIT are committed to maintain that.

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SANJAY SARMA: Courage is not when you do something

because you know it's gonna work,

courage is when you do something

because you're doing it because it's right,

and you know there are risks.

To me, there's something very profound about our ability

as an institution collectively

to take the risk when we make these forays.

If we ever say we won't do something

because that's too risky, that's not the MIT brand,

and in fact it'll take us away from the very thing

that brought us to where we are.

- [Interviewer] What do you think's next

for OpenCourseWare and open education?

What does the next 10 years...?

CHUCK VEST: The next 10 years for OpenCourseWare

it's going to be an adventure.

I certainly don't know exactly where this will lead,

just as we didn't really know 10 years ago

where it would lead,

but it's incumbent on all of us to think hard about it

and it's incumbent on OCW to listen a lot

to its users around the world for clues

to where we could most productively go,

because it's impacted the lives of a huge number

of people in ways

that you couldn't possibly have envisioned.

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