A Response Op-Ed on Dartmouth OCW

Update: Huge Huge thanks to Cole Ott, Kevin Donovan, and Jared Benedict for their help collecting arguments and editing drafts. Sorry I forgot to include this note initially. This piece would have sucked far more without you guys’ help!

I’m still waiting to see whether or not The Dartmouth will publish my response. So far I haven’t heard anything back.

I am writing in response to “No Such Thing as Free Learning,” from the September 30th issue of The Dartmouth.

In her article, Johnson questions the benefits of OpenCourseWare, writing, “we should not fool ourselves into thinking that publishing course material serves any purpose but to garner publicity for the College.” Publicity is only one advantage of OpenCourseWare, and it is perhaps the least important one. OCW also has immense advantages within the university. The 2005 audit of MIT OCW showed that 71% of students, 42% of alumni, and 59% of faculty used it. Students use it to learn more about a course that they’re considering signing up for, or to follow along with one that they can’t fit into their schedules. Alumni use it for continuing education and to maintain a feeling of connection with their alma-mater (donations, anyone?). Most importantly, professors use OCW to observe their colleagues (both on campus and at other schools) in order to learn from their teaching methods and to identify potential collaborations. In this way, OpenCourseWare expands learning across generations within the university itself.

However, the whole point of OCW is that it expands learning beyond the university. In her article, Johnson challenges the idea that OCW systems are effective learning resources, writing “A student would have to be a very rare breed of self-starter to be able to gain anything from the available course materials.” Now, I’ll be the first to say that there’s nothing quite like being in the classroom and taking part in a dialogue involving both students and professors. It is my humble opinion that this is the most effective way to educate, and Dartmouth professors ought to stress discussion more in their courses. This is also the reason why a Dartmouth OCW system would never de-incentivize enrollment in the college.

That being said, lectures and syllabi can be incredibly useful to people who don’t have access to high-quality learning resources or who just need something that is free, accessible, and fast. Imagine the farmer in Kenya who wants to increase his crop yield or the student in Argentina who can’t understand her out of date textbook. One student in the US used MIT’s OCW to help him study for the physics AP exam. The front page of the MIT OCW website has a large banner linking to a page with many of these stories of how their system has been useful to students, educators, and independent learners around the world.

Clearly, OCW is not just something that worked once for MIT because they’re a big name and they were the first. The OpenCourseWare Consortium has over 200 member universities, and that doesn’t include many other open course projects such as Yale Open Courses and Harvard Medical School’s MyCourses. The future of education allows people of all backgrounds access to learning resources from top professors around the world with the click of a button.

If we are to make the world’s problems our own problems, as President Kim has urged us to, there is an obvious moral argument for why we as an institution should not be hoarding the great learning resources that we are creating. The demand for higher education is increasing far more rapidly than our universities can accommodate. Our mission should be to expand education and knowledge worldwide, from Hanover to Hanoi.

Johnson’s article brings up a cost-benefit analysis, which is an important thing to consider. It’s true, MIT OCW is expensive. However, it is largely funded by outside grants (from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to name a few), thus it is not true that every dollar put towards OCW is taken away from another aspect of the university. Furthermore, MIT is not the only model—the University of Michigan significantly reduces costs in their OCW system by using students in the publishing process through their dScribe system. Here at Dartmouth, many courses in both Thayer and the Physics & Astronomy department are already being captured on video for internal use. Also, many courses in the computer science department have lecture notes, syllabi, homework assignments, and even practice exams that are publicly available from the department’s website. The cost of making these materials OpenCourseWare would be very small—the barriers are almost purely administrative.

Finally, implementing OpenCourseWare at Dartmouth would be far more than simply a hop on the higher-ed bandwagon. Because of the transparency of OCW, each new system has the ability to observe existing ones to learn from and build off of them with fresh ideas. Though it’s clear that OpenCourseWare is part of the future of higher education, it’s not yet clear what the most effective system looks like. Dartmouth could really push the movement by exploring how OCW systems could be more collaborative and participatory. I sincerely believe that by building on the work of our peers and adding our own twist, Dartmouth can use OpenCourseWare to truly advance higher education in a lasting way.