From Bold Idea to Global Legacy: 25 Years of MIT OpenCourseWare Live Webcast

of MIT open learning from the beginning and that continue to guide the future of open education at MIT. Please join me in welcoming profess uh President Klu.

Thanks so much Demetus and Kurt. Uh and good morning to everyone here. Uh and a special greeting to the faculty and staff who organized today's symposium and to all the faculty, educators, learners who share their experiences and

insights today. So uh 25 years ago when OCW sprang to life, I lived 600 miles away. So I can't say I was at MIT for 40 years. Um but even over that distance we heard the reverberations right away and for a long time thereafter. It was an incredibly brave, selfless and bold thing for MIT to have done. So generous and so generative both at the same time. Now more than two decades later, this MIT spirit and values that inspired OCW, the boldness, the instinct for service, and the desire for impact that were really central to OCW is what drew me

here to MIT. So it's a wonderful honor to join you for this milestone. And although I wasn't actually here at the time, in some ways I feel that I was because MI OCW's founding story is woven deeply into sort of the mythology and ethos of MIT. In 2001, the whole world of higher education was talking about digital learning. Actually, the world of higher education, more accurately, was fretting. Um, no one knew what to do. And then the institute made a big bet with the full weight of its reputation. With the announcement of MIT Open Courseware, it committed to a 10-year initiative to do something no university of MIT stature had ever dared to open the doors without requiring a key. The idea was to share lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and video lectures from thousands of courses. a public website covering the MIT curriculum.

Good morning. — Um, my name is Dimmitri Bert Simas. I'm the vice provos for open learning. I have been at MIT 41 years and uh, as many of you, I love this institution. Dear colleagues, friends, members of the MIT community and the world. I'm certain there are people who came um I know actually some people came all the way from many far places. 25 years ago at a time when most universities were asking how do we monetize online content? MIT asked a fundamentally different question. How do we give it away? That question, bold, counterintuitive, and unmistakenly MIT changed the world. President Charles Vest Chuck, uh, as

he's known, saw what others could not. He declared that MIT would freely share its knowledge with anyone, anywhere, an act of breathtaking institutional generosity. Chuck understood what that knowledge unlike material resources grows when you share it. Hal Abson was the intellectual architect who saw that openness was not a threat to academic excellence but its greatest amplifier. His advocacy laid the found the philosophical and pra p practical foundations for everything we celebrate today. Dig Yu who is in the audience had the original idea I'm told he also turned vision into reality with extraordinary operational skill and quieted quiet determination he built the infrastructure and teams that transform an audacious idea into a living platform to all three on behalf of this community and the millions you have touched thank you 500 million learners ers from villages in subharan Africa, from bustling cities

in South Asia, from small towns in Latin America and Eastern Europe have come to MIT's virtual doors and found them wide open. Six millions more on our YouTube channel alone. But let me make it more personal. Several of my own PhD students have told me the same story. They grew up far from Cambridge. They had talent, drive, and curiosity. But what they lacked was access. And then they found OCW, a lecture on optimization, a problem set that opened a door they did not know existed. OCW did not just teach them, it found them. It reached across oceans and said, "You belong here. " And now they are here contributing to MIT and to the world. And yet we are just beginning. Artificial intelligence, adaptive learning, immersive digital experiences. These tools gives us the ability to do what Chuck, Hal, and Dick dreamed of at a scale and depth they could scarcely have imagined. We will move from open access to open impact. I aspire ensuring not just that knowledge is available but it transforms lives. If OCW prove one thing, it is this. When MIT opens its doors, the world walks in. 25 years ago, MIT made a bet on openness, on generosity, on the belief that knowledge is a public good. That bet has paid off 500 millions times over. To President V's memory, to Hal, to Dick, and to everyone who made OCW possible, you gave the world a gift that keeps giving. Now it is our turn to carry it forward with the same courage, the same conviction, and the same unmistakable MIT spirit. you will see today that the future of open learning is bright and it belongs to all of us. Thank you. I would like to invite um my colleague and friend Kurt Newman who heads OCW. — Thanks Dmitri and thank you to everyone for joining us on this wonderful celebration day. Um while some of the numbers that Dmitri has just shared with you, reaching 500 million learners for instance, that just tells part of the story, the true measure of this work lives in the experiences of the learners and the educators around the world and their stories of curiosity sparked, resilience strengthened, and opportunities unlocked. We hear from learners around the globe who've used open courseware in deeply personal ways. For some, it begins with curiosity. For others, it's really a tool for navigating challenging times. And for many others, it provides a flexible, self-directed path for upskilling and for growth. Take for example a learner named Thomas from Chile who first discovered open courseware when he was 17 years old. He explored a course principles of pharmarmacology to advance his after-school scientific project of extracting and studying medicinal properties of plants and then shared what he learned with the members of his 16 person science group. His story reflects the power of access to meet learners where they are and what they're interested in. He told us speaking in Spanish, "Thanks to the pharmarmacology course, I can collect and synthesize the information we need to learn to prepare the medicines for our project. Take advantage of MIT's free digital technologies and tools. " He says, "Keep an open mind as to how the knowledge can be applied. " And this is also where the distinction an important distinction between simply free and truly open knowledge becomes so important. Free access is powerful and absolutely necessary. But openness goes further. It invites participation. It allows learners and educators not just to consume knowledge but to adapt it, to share it, and make it meaningful in their own communities and their contexts. We see that in the ways educators around the world are using these materials, enriching their teaching, experimenting with new approaches, and building a more connected and collaborative global learning community. We're grateful to know that this brave leap into open education that MIT took 25 years ago has been, in the words of our colleague James Gapag, who's a dean of educational technology and learning resources and distance learning at College of the Canyons. He says not just pathbreaking it's been path making for other institutions to follow and we see this in the broader momentum of open education as a movement through the dedication and leadership of our colleagues like James. The rise of open textbooks, for instance, just one form of open educational resources, has already saved students in United States and Canada hundreds of millions of dollars while also improving their learning outcomes. So with this, I'd like to invite my colleague Demetri back up to introduce our very special guest. As we celebrate 25 years of MIT Open Courseware, we also recognize the leadership that continues to carry this mission forward. It is my honor to introduce MIT's president, Sally Kornflu. President Klum Sally led has led with clarity and conviction championing MIT core values of excellence, openness, freedom of expression, and institutional independence, especially important in these trying times. She has also articulated with remarkable clarity MIT's mission to advance knowledge to serve the nation and the world grounded in merit, access, and open educational opportunity. These are the very principles that have saved MI have shaped MIT open courseware which is part of MIT open learning from the beginning and that continue to guide the future of open education at MIT. Please join me in welcoming profess uh President Klu. Thanks so much Demetus and Kurt. Uh and good morning to everyone here. Uh and a special greeting to the faculty and staff who organized today's symposium and to all the faculty, educators, learners who share their experiences and insights today. So uh 25 years ago when OCW sprang to life, I lived 600 miles away. So I can't say I was at MIT for 40 years. Um but even over that distance we heard the reverberations right away and for a long time thereafter. It was an incredibly brave, selfless and bold thing for MIT to have done. So generous and so generative both at the same time. Now more than two decades later, this MIT spirit and values that inspired OCW, the boldness, the instinct for service, and the desire for impact that were really central to OCW is what drew me here to MIT. So it's a wonderful honor to join you for this milestone. And although I wasn't actually here at the time, in some ways I feel that I was because MI OCW's founding story is woven deeply into sort of the mythology and ethos of MIT. In 2001, the whole world of higher education was talking about digital learning. Actually, the world of higher education, more accurately, was fretting. Um, no one knew what to do. And then the institute made a big bet with the full weight of its reputation. With the announcement of MIT Open Courseware, it committed to a 10-year initiative to do something no university of MIT stature had ever dared to open the doors without requiring a key. The idea was to share lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and video lectures from thousands of courses. a public website covering the MIT curriculum. Now, at the time, the prevailing wisdom in higher education was to protect the brand, to be cautious. Actually, I still hear that about lots of things, protecting the brand. But leaders like Chuck Vest, Dick Yu, Chagaru, Miaawa, and Hal Abson, along with all of MIT's at the time, 950 faculty members saw it very differently. They believe that the brand of MIT wasn't something to be hoarded. It was something to be shared. At its core, open courseware is a bold digital manifestation of MIT's fundamental mission to advance knowledge, to educate students, and to serve the nation and the world. By its very existence, it asserts that the MIT experience should not be defined by the walls of our classrooms, but by the reach of our ideas. Today, this risky experiment has evolved into a global cornerstone of educational equity. Open courseware has cemented MIT's leadership in open knowledge and access to education. We have proven, as Demetra said, when you share excellence, you don't actually diminish its value, you multiply its impact. As Curtain and Demetrius both noted, the numbers are striking. More than 500 million people have learned from MIT's materials thanks to open courseware. In fact, you know, I was in meeting with some first year students earlier this year, and I asked a student how she wound up at MIT. She was in a sort of underprivileged area. She hadn't had access to any AP courses. She had taken five MIT classes before even applying to MIT. And I think that this is the kind of story that we hear over and over again um when we talk to students who are here at MIT and we talk to others elsewhere who were touched by uh the influence of these courses. For perspective, 500 million is the population more than the population of uh US and Mexico. Um, but the true legacy isn't in the metrics. It's in the landscape of education that has been fundamentally reshaped. OCW didn't just open MIT's doors. It kicked off a global movement. It inspired universities across the world to launch their own open course initiatives, expanding the open education movement far beyond what anyone could have imagined in 2001. Today, OCW is cited in national education strategies, in by nonprofit initiatives, by international development programs. Proof that openness can scale when you lead with vision and with courage. It's actually embodied in things like the teacher in rural Appalachia using OCW to refine their physics curriculum. It's in the high school in Virginia who used OCW, as I mentioned before, to stand in for AP coursework not being offered at the school. And a student who found yes, she could do the work. She could go to college. And it's in the lifelong learners living anywhere in the world who through OCW found the spark to improve their own knowledge and to change their communities for the better. That includes learners like uh Sujude Eluma from Sudan. Sujude discovered OCW when she was struggling with her university's programming courses. She went on to complete more than 20 OCW courses, strengthening her skills and ultimately discovering a passion for data science. Today, she uses that knowledge and passion to tackle real world challenges, including responding to devastating floods in her own country. Her story is a reminder of how open knowledge can transform not only individual learners but their whole communities. As you'll hear from panelists today, open courseware has broadened MIT's impact to every corner of the globe. It has democratized the school the tools of discovery and given millions of people the power to change their lives. We feel its impact here on campus as well. What we often don't emphasize enough is that OCW isn't doesn't just share MIT's teaching, it improved MIT's teaching. Faculty came to see their teaching in a new light. They were able to collaborate across departments and they embraced digital tools that have shaped how we educate our own students. In fact, OCW laid the groundwork for every digital learning advance that follows. MITx, MIT Open Learning, MicroMasters, and now MIT Learn. Each new platform stands on the shoulders of this original brave idea. With MIT Learn, our new online platform, people have access to even more online courses and resources from across the institute so they can learn with and from MIT. In short, the world is different because of a bold idea that started here. And I'll note that much of this progress was made possible by the contributions of thousands of supporters including early funders, the Hullet Foundation, the Melon Foundation, Abonicio, as well as newer foundations like Arcadia. We're deeply grateful for all that they do to support MIT learning. Needless to say, OCW would be an empty vessel without the extraordinary intellectual contributions of our faculty sustained over many years. So again I do want to thank the faculty. I devoted OCW staff and team past and present whose perseverance, creativity and excellence have powered this for a quarter century. Their work in curating, organizing, digitizing, maintaining thousands of courses is a remarkable collective act of s service to the world and this is the legacy being celebrated today. We know that the work of equitable access is unfinished. Barriers to highquality learning still exist, whether linguistic, economic, geographic, or technological. MIT remains committed to lowering those barriers, expanding reach, and really ensuring that knowledge is not a privilege, but a public good. As we look ahead, let's continue to imagine boldly. Let's keep asking what knowledge we can share, what tools we can invent, and whose lives we can help change next. As AI accelerates the way we create, personalize, and deliver knowledge, this mission becomes even more vital. The world needs trusted, rigorous, openly accessible knowledge. And I believe MIT will continue to lead in this era of learning. So, thank you all for being part of the journey. Um, I look forward to seeing what exciting futures uh you all will continue to build and to help enable it in any way possible. So, thank you video or video. — There's this consistent vision. MIT has asked itself in the words of TS Elliott, "Do idea disturb the universe? And the consistent thing about MIT is MIT has been willing to say yes. Thank you all for uh joining us here today. As president of MIT, I've come to expect top level innovative and intellectually entrepreneurial ideas from the MIT community. Today the word democratize seems very cliched. — We invented that with knowledge and I think it's a profound thing. — 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 open courseware is not exactly what I had expected. 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? — It was sort of a feeding frenzy on the possibilities of profiting from knowledge. The prevailing idea then was this is a gold mine for universities to publish their stuff and market it. Part of the response was to create this educational technology council. The proposal on the table was that MIT could enter into the space by offering small modules packaged as a 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. — The key person really was Dick Yu. He's the one who really had the initial idea. — I know exactly where I was. I was at home. What I was doing, my wife remembered where it was. — He was getting some food out of his refrigerator, thinking about all of this, and suddenly occurred to him saying, "Why don't we just give it away? " — I've heard it different ways. — Hal told us the story, and I don't know if it's the right story. — I was on an exercise bike at home. I think I was on the exercise bike, but just came to my mind. How about we make something big and we give it away? It sounded crazy cuz nobody did that. That was where open customer came about that we would give it away. We won't make a dime but we would get impact. Open Courseware is a web-based program that will provide free access to primary materials for virtually every course at MIT. — I remember hearing about open courseware when it first got announced and we're like, "Yes, this is so right. This is so much what MIT is about. " — It literally almost took my breath away. I thought it was stunning. No one was open licensing content at that point in time, let alone full courses. It was a breakthrough thinking in a lot of there was a pretty long time of gee making sure there was real support from the faculty and a lot of hearing you know both enthusiasm and just a lot of skepticism. If students can go get this stuff on the web, why do they need to come get a university education? — 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, — 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 other students can be affected. The first time ever that my intro to development class was put on OCW. I think that very first year I taught more student than I had ever taught before. 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. 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. 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. It's about empowering people to actually use this technology to improve their lives and improve the world. I first came upon OCW when I was about 14 years old. I'm originally from Ukraine and when the war started and I was trying to find an opportunity to learn more beyond high school's curriculum. 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. — And that is just one over 101. — Then as I learned English more, I became a big user of the platform. — 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? — OCW became this stepping stone and right now I'm a first year student here and I'm deeply grateful for that. If you can inform someone and give them that knowledge and help them make better decisions as people, multiply that fact a thousand times and you know you're building a better world. In my opinion, — 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. 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. 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. 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. — It's always good to ask how could it fail. 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 Kvisher will speak Ukrainian. — It maintains her natural pace, her tone, and it's really fascinating. Our most popular courses tend to be in calculus and physics and learning to program. — Let's look at what this code's supposed to do. — But a vitally important part of the education in MIT is the integration of other disciplines across the social sciences, humanities, and the arts. People might not realize that there's a pretty vibrant set of physical education experiences reflected on open courseware such as videos about scuba diving and archery. President Fest vision was always that open courseware would be a permanent part of MIT and for that to happen we had to make sure that it delivered real value to MIT. One of the way in which we're using the open courseware material is as part of flip classroom. student who listen to the video at home and when they come to class my students do case studies. So open courseware material is used as very very rich textbook in a way. 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 maybe 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. It's a face that launched a thousand ships. A lot of later online efforts looked back to open courseware and say that was the model. Open courseware 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 want to stand for that same principle. So there's a direct through line from what MIT did with open courseware to the existence of Khan Academy. 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 20s, 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. UCW 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 open courses that are available on the web. — 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. If we democratize education, we will have those future geniuses who can push society forward. — I envision the future where we combine multimodel data in a more global way in languages that are not only English but multiple others — is what we call speed. Having a trusted source like open coursework is critical for a future and we at MIT are committed to maintain that. Courage is not when you do something because you know it's going to work. Courage is when you do something because you're doing it because it's right um and you know there are risks. I mean 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 it'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. — Think's next for open courseware and open education. What is the next 10 years hold? for open courseware. 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. Thank you. I thought I might tear up a little bit. Um, that's a world premiere of that video. Uh, congratulations to the whole team that helped make this happen. Uh, so I'd like to invite, uh, the panelists for, uh, for this panel with, uh, three current MIT faculty to follow up on that. as we're coming up and getting started, um just wanted to say um there are so many people that have helped build this movement and you know unfort unfortunately we couldn't uh we couldn't get all their voices included. Um so I just want to give another sort of collective big heartfelt thank you and round of applause for everyone who's contributed to make the open education movement possible. you know who you are. So, OCW at MIT exists because the MIT faculty have been willing to share their teaching freely and openly with the world. And so, I'm so glad to now be in conversation with three of these faculty to share their perspectives more in the moment. like to start with Annabelle, senior lecturer in electrical engineering, computer science and a digital learning scientist in open learning's delta team. Delta stands for disciplinary experts in learning technology and applications where she focuses on introductory computer science education. She teaches and develops MIT's foundational programming courses working to make rigorous computer science accessible to beginners. Um, we currently have three OCW courses by Anna. She's also featured in a recent pot radio video podcast episode where rubber duck ducks play a really good supporting role. Um, Professor John Gruber is forward professor of economics and chair of the economics department here at MIT, former director of the healthc care program, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a former president of the American Society of Health Economists and the Eastern Economics Association, published more than 200 research articles, edited seven research volumes, and has written three books, including Public Finance and Public Policy, a leading undergraduate text in its seventh edition. In 2006, you received the American Society of Health Economist inaugural medal for the best economist, health economist in the nation aged under 40. During the 1997 98 academic year, Dr. Gruber was deputy assistant secretary for economic policy, the Treasury Department, key architect of Massachusetts ambitious health reform effort, and served on the health connector board, the main implementing body for that effort. and in 2009 to 2010 served as technical consultant in the Obama administration worked with the administration and congress to help craft the patient protection and affordable care act on OCW. John's m introduction to microeconomics course is the most visited non- STEM subject that we've got and a brand new version of his public policy and public finance course is getting lots of attention. He's also a recent guest on the Chalk Radio video podcast and uh you should check out the bonus content where he responds to some YouTube comments. It's quite a treat. Uh Christopher Capzola is the Elting E. Morrison professor of history from 2022 to 25. He also served as senior associate dean for open learning in that role overseeing open education offerings including open courseware MITx as well as several other programs. He continues to facilitate conversations about generative AI in teaching and learning at MIT and advocate for open, affordable, and equitable post-secary learning in US higher ed. For over 20 years, he's taught US history at MIT and is the author of two books on US political history. Chris was also an early OCW participant starting with three courses in our big 500 courses launch back in 2003. So I'd like to start um with a reflection on the range of reasons that people have for participating in open coursework. I'd like to hear from you if I may professionally and personally why you choose to do so. So start with you Anna. You know your introductory programming courses are collectively I think our most popular topic in the last few years. What's motivated you to share this stuff with the world on OCW and to keep doing so? — Uh thanks. Uh so both personally and professionally there I guess two reasons. So OCW I think came out when I was in high school and I probably started using it in undergrad. Uh there were, you know, probably physics and calculus courses and a couple of CS courses originally and I just used them as resources to help augment my learning uh with the assignments that were available for free and the exams I would just, you know, use them to just help me study. And it is absolutely wild to think that 15 years later, I would then put my own courses that uh I was teaching at MIT on OCW. And it was it's just I was reflecting on that yesterday and it was just wild to think about just that, you know, going from a user to uh someone who's just now making these um you know uh materials. It's just it's been great to have this opportunity. I just like again I have no words for that. Um and so that's my personal reason. Professionally I think I I've been thinking a lot about the way students learn and they learn best by repetition. Um, and so, you know, repeated exposure to concepts is very important for students to learn the materials. And so I feel like if I put my materials out there, it gives students an opportunity to see the same material they might be learning in their own classrooms in a completely different light from a completely different perspective. You know, me, um, you know, is different than their current teacher. And so I think, um, that it helps them retain the material a lot better. and it kind of, you know, it's a reinforcement learning uh outside of their own classrooms. And so, in a sense, I feel like it's rewarding students who put in the effort to um to, you know, who have to put in the effort to learn, who have students who have this intrinsic motivation to just go out there and uh actually understand the material as opposed to just, you know, pass the class. So, those are my two reasons. Personal, I used it, now I get to contribute. Second, it's just pedagogically a good thing to do. — Wonderful. Thank you. Yeah. Um all kinds of follow-up questions I'd love to ask, but we're running a little bit behind time, so gonna keep rolling. Um so to you, John, now you've also been a long-term participant. In fact, uh we've done several versions each of your intro to microeconomics and public policy and finance courses. And you were also one of the first participants back in 2003. I wonder if you could cast your mind back to that early moment when you were first invited to participate in this thing that we didn't know what it would turn into. What motivated you to take the leap? — You made it incredibly easy. I mean, look, we're getting a lot of praise, but like what's it involve? I got to put a mic on when I lecture. I got to upload my problem sets and notes, and you come back to me and say, "It's done. Look at it. " I'm like, "Okay, that's great. " I mean, what's not to like? You just made it unbel you. The resources MIT put in to making this easy for our incredibly busy faculty are the differencemaker. If MIT had come to me and said look we want you to go record a whole bunch of separate lectures. I would have said no. Uh basically we are busy people and you have taken the resources to make it easy. And uh the benefit to me all comes from something that no one under 45 or under 50 will understand which is there used to be a time before phones when you talk to people on planes. You won't remember this. And every single time I sat down next to someone and said I taught economics, they'd say to me, "God, that's the worst course I ever took. " And I thought, "How can this be? " I mean, I said I'm not your favorite, but it can't be your worst. I thought it's just taught badly. often it's taught in high schools by the gym teacher or the history teacher. They don't know what they're talking and so to me the benefit is to be able to get the world to understand economics uh in in much better and improve their lives in that way. Wonderful. Thank you. Um Chris, um I'm especially curious, you know, having published on OCW, then you took the leap to like join the family and work with us very closely for a number of years. Kind of what drew you in to just be that much more involved in this open courseware work. — Yeah. No, it's been uh it was a great adventure and part of it is you know, I blame Sanjay Sarma for um you know, for coming up with the idea. Um, but I think the real answer is I'm going to start actually with a with an equation. And that equation is 4 + 10 equals 16. Right? So Anna is sitting here saying like, what's going on over in the humanities? — We let this guy in OCW. I'm not sure we want him teaching our students. — So those are UN sustainable development goals. Four is education, 10 is reducing inequality, and 16 is just in democratic institutions. Right? Right. And so I just fundamentally believe that 4 + 10 equals 16 and I believe that if that MIT through open courseware um and all of our open education initiatives, right, um has committed, right, to solving that problem, right? And I just wanted to kind of roll up my sleeves and be part of it and I had the chance to work with 175 amazing staff members who make that happen every day. — Thank you. Yeah, we're grateful that you made that Jeep that four plus 10 equals 16. I'm going to remember that. Thank you. Yeah. Um I want to turn a little bit more attention to the stories of impact that you've heard. Um John, you uh referred to, you know, the people you sat next to an airplane who didn't necessarily have a good experience. Um is there a story of positive impact that you've heard from, you know, things that you've shared yourself or more broadly an open education that really stands out for you? — Yeah, I started I'm arrogant enough that I keep a little folder of all the nice emails I get. I started to go through them and rather than just reading a particular one, I just thought I would reflect on the incredible diversity of countries and uh people that I hear from who say, you know, I never thought I could take a class of this quality. I never thought I could learn so much about economics. Thank you so much for setting me on this educational path or for educating me. And I guess personally I love particularly the ones that say now I'm going to go study economics. You know that's what I wanted. And I love in particular the messages I get which are you know I didn't really know about economics. I attacked your I took your class. I'm going to go major economics. I'm going to go further in economics. And that is uh just incredibly gratifying. — Wonderful. Thank you. How about you Anna? Anything stand out? — Uh I have not been recognized on an airplane yet. That's very growth mindset but it's coming. Yeah, I know. Growth mindset of me. Um again I don't have any specific story but like uh John here I think it's just there's um like an incredible reach that OCW has. So I've also been contacted by you know students who have taken the courses and there are eight-year-olds courses. There are 80 year olds students who are blind who have taken these courses and successfully gone through it. Um there are people who you know go through power outages every single day and they have successfully gone through the course and it's just like this motivation to just you know their love of learning that just kind of pushes them on to just continue and you know complete these courses and also educators have taken the courses and have gone on and you know taken some of the things that we implement in our classrooms and implemented in their own like in um Nigeria especially they've uh taken a lot of things that we've done and just kind of implemented in their own. So yeah, just a huge reach and love of learning. — Yeah. — Amazing to see. — Yeah, I'll lift up that investments that we make to make sure that our content is accessible in all of the different manifestations, you know, really glad to hear that. Chris, any particular impact stories for you? you know there I mean there are so many but I think uh it's worth putting a thumb on the scale for the people who take uh OCW materials and do things with them that we didn't imagine either in our own classrooms or at open learning right who and um and that that's the fundamental sort of um motivation I think behind open courseware and why it's openly licensed allows for reusing remixing um and sort of making allowing people to do creative things with it. And of course uh some of the that most creative stuff happens when people need to solve their own educational challenges, right? And we heard from Sophia from Ukraine and in the video and there have been many other learners who are displaced, refugees, etc. Um who have like who have not let that displace or deter their educational mission and that's been super inspiring over the last few years. — Good. Thank you. Um, next question I'd like to ask has to do with how wonderful it's been to discover OCW's reach across the whole lifelong learning spectrum. You know, there was an idea, I think originally, that it would mostly be used by other educators in school settings. And, you know, well over half of our reach and impact has nothing to do with people who are officially in school. And each of you teaches a topic that feels like especially sort of resonant with sort of broad citizen awareness at this moment, you know. Um what perspective might you have about what OCW and open education more broadly can do to support people's lifelong engagement in this field that you are very deeply connected to? And Chris, I'd like to start with you. This being a moment when so much history is being made. Yes, more. Yes, more of it every day. Um uh and I think, you know, I'm going to answer that question not just um thinking about American history, although I'll get back to that, but I think in many ways all of these big concepts that we talk about right now around lifelong learning, um around workforce development, all of those imagine people who are going to school forever, right? people who will who they may get a degree or not but they will never graduate right they will always be learners and if you trace that back to its intellectual roots I think you get back to 2001 um and the launch of open courseware right because you can't be a lifelong learner unless there's lifelong learning materials out there right um and I think that in order to kind of empower those those learners um OCW and all of MIT's initiatives play a real role in Good. Thank you. John, how about you? So much attention is put on this thing that we call the economy and its intersections with people's lives. What do you hope for there? Look, I think another moment while I was making history where we're struggling with democracy as a world right now and there is a fundamental link between being well educated and supporting democracy. uh the bedrock of authoritarian leaders is they try to cut down education. They try to limit people's ability to understand what's going on in the world. And the fundamental resource we can provide to fight that is free online education so that people around the world can be informed about what's really going on about how to program a computer about what's going on in history about how economies work so that they can understand that they should support free and democratic societies uh to make the best decisions and to support people in the best way. And I just can't think of a better way than what y'all have done in making this kind of resource available freely to people so that all over the world where their leaders may be trying to stop them from getting the education they deserve and need, they're meeting this human goal of getting that education. and Anna um learning the program has been for the past bunch of years an incredible sort of gateway into you know better jobs and so forth and so much change a foot with what's happening with AI. How do you think about this? — Uh so I'm not super worried about Gen AI taking over our uh jobs. I'm super excited about it because wait but not because I don't want the jobs because it will evolve as things always do. So I think uh okay if I wore a hoodie I'd put that on right now because like the thing about computer science is you think about just hackers supposed to like write code really quickly and you know come up with it quickly and just like type type. Um but it's not about that and I think that's been a barrier for a lot of people to get into computer science and programming because that is the misconception even now I think that's misconception but with Genai coming on board that part of doing the actual coding is now going to be outsourced most of the time to genai so I personally think that now the computer science education is going to go into the bookend parts of programming computer science which is the creative part of coming up with the solution and you don't need a typy type for that. You just need a pen and pencil and creativity. Um, and then the other part is the uh the testing. So you get code back. How do you know if it's right or not? And you'd have to do that whether you did it yourself or whether the AI wrote it for you. You can't really trust yourself or the AI. So both of those pieces are a lot more creative than just typy type code. Um, so I think it's going to make programming a lot more accessible to people um, who, you know, it's no longer like this hacker, you know, this hacker thing. It's now just going to be, you know, thinking up with, uh, coming up with solutions to problems and then figuring out, you know, well, what are some tests that I need to run? What are some possible, you know, ways that I can break this code or things like that. So, — yeah. — So, we'll keep learning about that. — Keep learning about it. And Yeah. — Good. All right. um like to wrap up with just an open question briefly. Um what's a hope that you have for the future of this work? You know, we're celebrating the 25 years today and also projecting forward into the future. Um Anna, anything you'd like to start with there? — Um yeah, so I hope that uh OCW continues to be offered exactly as is no strings attached. I think uh learners know what they're getting into whenever, you know, when they see OCW. It's been the same for 25 years and there's no, you know, no hidden fees, you know, nothing like that. It's a very incredibly simple model for what learners get out of it, right? So, you have useful content and a glimpse into MIT courses. That's it. And I think I hope it stays that way because it's very simple and it works well. — Thank you, John. Um, I hope that we can find a more effective hybrid of online learning and inerson learning to provide lowerc cost educational opportunities. I think OCW has been incredible. It must be continue to be offered. At the same time, I feel like the labor market is not yet recognized in the credentialism of open courseware because they still want some of that real college feel. And I I'm hoping that uh we can figure out a way, you know, Esther in the video talked about flip classrooms. We can figure out a way to effectively partner with what we're doing with in-person instruction to provide a lowerc cost educational alternative. I wish MIT could be offered to 10 times as many people. It can't physically. It can online. Can we create in ways that we can take the MIT OCD material, pair it with some in-person learning that sort of labor market values and the people seem to want and produce much less expensive education for the masses. — Hear that? — All right, Chris. — So, um, you know, everybody all morning has been talking about how big open courseware is and how big it got and how fast. Um and my hope actually is that MIT open courseware is something small right a small part of a much bigger open ecosystem right and here it's worth thinking about MIT's role in the development and adoption of open software through the MIT license and other mechanisms the role of MIT community members in creating and sustaining the creative commons um and other tools for creatively sharing uh work uh the leadership of the MIT faculty and libraries in MIT's open access policy, ongoing efforts to challenge uh the market actions of large for-profit publishers um that disort distort scholarly uh priorities. Uh initiatives toward open science um codified in federal legislation um in the previous administration that enabled the rapid broad dissemination of publicly funded knowledge. Um and more broadly uh both at our campus and beyond uh an open culture of sharing, giving and openness um to make uh MIT into the kind of institution that builds bridges and not walls. — Yeah. If I may, sounds like you're advocating let's keep losing market share in the open space. Yeah, — indeed. What a — indeed. Let's do it. — All right. Thank you. Well, please uh join me in thanking our panelists here. We're we're running just a little bit behind schedule. We now pretty much caught up. Um I'm hoping that at the end of our many of our panels will have an opportunity for a little bit of Q& A at the audience. Didn't quite land here. our next, you know, our next session will start at 15 past the hour and we got to turn things around, bring up our next panelists. Um, so that next session, learning without limits, how OCW opens opportunity for curious minds worldwide. Again, we'll begin uh in about 12 minutes from now. Please stay tuned for this panel with learners and educators. I just don't go I need a wicked way. Heat. I got water. between Yeah. Yeah. Wow. — Yes. I can hear you as well, Victor. — Hi. It's so great to meet you. Heat. Hey. Hey. Heat. hey, hey. Heat. yeah. Hey. I can get a hug. Thank you guys. Take it up. I wonder. What do you think May I ask you to take our seats please get started. We are number All right, we're going to get our next session started if we can get everybody seated again and uh hello to our online participants as well. Sarah, my colleague Sarah Hansen, I'll hand it off to you to get us rolling. Thank you. — Thank you so much and thank you to all of you. — I am. I think it's just not on. Yay. Welcome back everybody. Thank you for joining our very special session on learning without limits. It's wonderful to see everyone in person and everyone online. As we mark the 25th anniversary of open courseware, we're not just celebrating the breadth of knowledge that's been shared, but we're also celebrating the impact that it's had on people around the world. And we're lucky to be sitting next to some educators and learners today. My name is Sarah Hansen. I'm the assistant director for open education innovation at MIT open learning and much of my work focuses on the experiences of educators and learners. So I really couldn't be more pleased than to be moderating this panel today. Our session brings together learners and educators whose stories show the power of curiosity and access. And I'm really excited for you to hear directly from them. And bonus for you today, at the end, if there's time, you'll have an opportunity to ask them questions, too. So, I'd like to introduce the panelists. Um, we'll start right here. Hinata Yamahara is a high school student, a high school senior from Georgia whose discovery of OCW opened the door to his passion for urban planning and helped him explore far beyond what a typical high school curriculum can offer. Yeah, I know. Please. Yes. Dr. Victor Odu Muiwa joins us online. We actually worked together, Victor, a few years ago. So, it's lovely to see you. Um he is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Logos, a leader in responsible AI research and a former MIT empowering the teachers fellow who has used OCW to strengthen teaching research and innovation capacity across Africa. Dr. Yeah, please. You're in the presence of greatness. You should appreciate it. — Thank you. Thank you and good afternoon everyone. Good day everyone. Thank you. — So wonderful to see you. Victor Dr. Elizabeth Syler — is a professor in the business administration and economics department at Worcester State University. You saw her in the video. She advocates for open educational resources like OCW and uses them almost exclusively in her teaching. And finally, Andrea Henchel is a superstar. She's a PhD candidate in aeronautics here at MIT. She's also a veteran of the Air Force. And I know and uh she's used OCW to adjust back into academia. So, I'm really excited for you to hear her story. So, let's give her a round of applause, too. Let's start at the beginning. I'm curious what inspired you to learn or to teach with open courseware. Was it curiosity, a specific need, or may maybe even an unexpected discovery? Um, and Hinata, I'd like for you to start us off. — Sure. Yeah. So, um, is my mic working? Uh, I started off, uh, with open courseware. Um, really unexpectedly. I was just browsing the web for different uh like I guess research just getting data on a topic I wasn't really familiar with but I wanted to learn more about. So I was on a train from um Tokis Narita airport if you guys have ever been there. It's really far from the city and you go through nothing to get into the city and in those like quote unquote nothing areas they're building these new towns and I was really curious to what those were and then while I was researching that on the train I was really jetlagged so I didn't get to read it until I got to the hotel but it was MIT's open courseware course and I was reading that I knew nothing so I had to do a bunch of research as I was reading the articles and listening to lectures and stuff like that but I got to know a lot more and then I just kept on curious and then you know I was on a trip to Japan but I just ended up staying in my hotel room reading about a bunch of urban planning so I kind of wasted my parents money but yeah it was really nice um I got to pursue my uh I guess like passion in uh urban planning after that uh I continued to study it throughout my high school years and uh open course where I supported my time through that it's free um I thought they were going to ask me for money they never ended up doing that so that was a big part of me yeah as a broke high school student. I can't really afford any extra money to pursue my passion. So, yeah, that's where I got started with open courseware. — Nice. — Wonderful. And I'm seeing a pattern. So, — Professor Gruber talked about talking about OCW on an airplane. You're talking about trains. So, Dimmitri, this might be an avenue we need to explore in the future. — Uh, Victor, how about you? Can you share how you first discovered OCW? — Yeah, thank you. Uh so my first experience with OCW was based on my application for the fellowship at MIT which is the MIT ET program and so I had to look at uh similar courses to the courses I teach back home and so that was my first experience with OCW and when I actually came into MIT for the fellowship uh I discover more resources and then I got glued to it because I could see a lot of content and more interestingly the design of this content made it more interesting to me and uh that was the starting point. Thank you. — Thank you Elizabeth. So about 10 years ago, I was going to teach a new class in teach a class for the first time in negotiation. And as you do, I looked at what commercial textbooks were out at the time and picked one and was and taught from it. And you know, it was okay. Actually, it sucked. Um, sorry, I'm not going to tell you what it was. And also at the same time um my our librarians I think this was part of a state statewide thing in Massachusetts but the librarians at Worester State were really promoting this thing called open education resources and I had most of us had never heard of this and you know what if there were these lists of like you could go to these websites and look for stuff and I was like yeah sure there's going to be something at MIT about negotiation and guess what there was and so I found a course by that Mary Row I think you're the ones Yes, lots of nods. I Yeah. Uh the ombbudsman been here for many years, possibly decades, uh taught a class for the graduate business school here for um in 2001. So her OCW materials are basically a stack of paper, right? Paper. Yes. And it was a treasure chest. It was amazing. It was I didn't only get things that I could use for my students for free instead of having them try to go online to pay $8 to buy something from another school in Cambridge. And um yeah uh I'm really sorry about that. But also I learned so much about negotiation because things that I did not learn any place else because of she was teaching from her experience with literally thousands of people in conflict and solving them — and um yeah it was amazing. So — thank you. — Yes, — thank you for sharing that. Andrea, I'd invite you to also share your story. — Thank you so much. But if I can say quickly, thank you Sarah for moderating and I could not be more grateful to be able to celebrate 25 years of open courseware with this incredible group. Um my journey started um pretty much by necessity. Um so I was lucky enough my first assignment in the military was actually to come to MIT and earn a master's degree in the department of aeronautics and astronautics. Um but my first semester here was a little bit rough. I got a B and a C in my classes, which at MIT that's not very good. And actually for my program as well, I ended up being put on academic probation, which meant the military was concerned about my performance and considering uh having me withdraw from the program. Luckily, I had a great active mentor who said, "I think the issue is that you don't have the linear algebra background that you need for these courses. " And he asked me if I had heard of open courseware. And he pointed me towards uh Professor Gil String's linear algebra course. And I've heard that he may be there in person. Is that true? Fantastic. Professor String, thank you so much. I took two of his courses um between the fall and spring semester and ended up uh in the spring semester getting an A and a B. And literally ever since then uh because of open courseware I've gotten all A's in my academic programs since then. I just I can't imagine where else I would have had such an incredible tool. Um, so again, Professor String, uh, the open courseware team, you guys saved my master's degree. So, thank you so much for that. — Thank you. Open courseware often becomes a meaningful part of learners and educators lives. And I'd like to ask each of you to reflect on how open courseware has helped you grow personally, professionally, how it might have helped you meet a goal. I think that our audience would love to hear those stories. Hinata, would you like to start us off? — Sure. Um, well, as you probably know, I'm 18. Um, I've been having the privilege to travel a lot. And when my parents bring me to these cities that I've never heard of, I often used to look at them as like, oh, they're just old cities. They're not really that important. Or they're, you know, on the opposite side. They're really new. They feel really artificial. There's no life to it. I don't really care. So now after open courseware, I started to appreciate like how they actually planned out these new cities or these old cities. how they, you know, let's say there was a river running through the city and then, oh, they use that river to put business around it to get people around that river. Those little things translate to looking at a bunch of cities and everywhere I travel at a really different lens. I feel like that has really grown me as a traveler. Um, and I think I'm getting my parents money worth money's worth as well. So, I think they'll really appreciate that. But yeah. — Wow, that's neat. So OCW is shaping literally shaping how you see the world, how you read the world. — Exly. Very different. Yes. — Andrea, can you tell us about your story? And you know, you are looking at the world from the perspective of aeronautics. So I'm really curious what perspective — OCW is helping you to have. — Open courseware has opened uh no pun intended, but opened you so many different avenues for me. But I think the most salient one, the most memorable one for me was as I was transitioning out of the military. Uh I knew I wanted to continue to serve and just in a different capacity. I wanted to serve as an engineer and researcher and I'd been out of the classroom for a decade by this point. So I knew I needed to refresh my academic skills. I looked online for open programs and ke kept coming back to open courseware. It wasn't even deliberate. I wasn't targeting open courseware. It was just the courses that I wanted to take were available on open courseware. And that's actually what made me decide that MIT it was MIT or bust. I wanted to come back to MIT for my PhD because of this attitude of educational philanthropy. I didn't want to go any place else. I wanted to come to MIT. Um, I knew I needed to prove that I could still hack it academically to get accepted here. Um, I wanted to get a second masters in computer science to do that, but I didn't have an undergraduate degree in computer science. So, I used open courseware to computer architecture, networks, programming, and C, algorithms, and it absolutely 100% set me up for success. I went to Auburn University. I scored so high on the baseline test architecture. The professor told me I didn't need to attend classes. I did anyway. Uh and I was able to complete that program in months including thesis when it's scheduled for 21. And once I sent those transcripts to MIT, I was accepted to the PhD program here. And again, MIT's open course enabled all of that. All the professors that offer their materials, the staff, the administration, all of you enabled me to do that. start this new career to continue to serve as an engineering researcher. — I feel so proud to be part of the team that enabled you to do that because I feel like you're making such a difference in the world. And if I can be even like an atomsized piece of that um just feel very lucky. — Victor, I am so curious how open Courseware has shaped your teaching in the past. I've been able to talk with you about your dedication to education. Um could you tell the audience a little bit about that? Uh so I remember when I came to MIT that was in 2013 that should be about 13 years ago uh and one of the professors managing the fellowship program told me you have to go to take 6005 and check out what it's all about that was elements of software construction and so I was interested in raising very solid worldass software engineers so that was my goal and when I look at the course I saw that was well struct structured and designed course. Uh it was very interesting. So even for me as a professor I had to learn a lot of things. Yeah. And I had to even sit down to in class apart from using OCW to even sit down in class and see how it's been taken live as well. And so that was a really turning point because it made me to see how the um MIT students have been prepared for the future and uh how the world content and the world evaluations everything design how they design and so I learned a lot and I applied the same approach back home and sincerely I've got a lot of positive feedbacks people getting jobs in the global companies after taking the course I design when I came back to Nigeria based on that course uh people getting jobs at Google uh Microsoft because of the content and the structure of the course. So I actually followed it and redesign my own course back up. It was really a very good experience and uh I love the way the u the recitations I design and also I mean things around the assignment and very interesting not only software construction I also used this another course which is human interface design user interface design or postgraduate was also very interesting so one of the things I found there was at times when you use textbooks you don't get everything you want because uh this the flow in the books may not be good enough for you to actually help you to learn. But I see that the way the courses are designed I mean they are not following textbook per se but the design way how do we communicate knowledge to people and get them to understand it from beginning to the end. So I see that holistic design that changes the way people learn and make sure when somebody come to a classroom as a novice or you follow the material because it's based on a MIT curriculum really and you come in as a novice then you come out of the class at the end of the semester you come out as a mini expert. So I think that is very interesting design and that has actually also helped me also in designing my courses back. Thank you. — Thank you. It's one of the things I love about open courseware is that we share not only the content but the how the teaching happens and that seems to have been important in your journey. — So thank you for sharing that Elizabeth. How about you? — Yeah. Um so I'm going to say this in maybe two sentences but to be clear this is a very longterm nonlinear process. untethering my classes, untethering my teaching from a textbook because and teaching, you know, because teaching a textbook is just how we've always done it has made me question so many other things about how we've always done it. So many other assumptions and I'm going to leave you all to find your own examples for that because I think you probably can. — Yeah. — Thank you. — So this sort of leads into my next question which maybe we'll start with you then and that's about barriers. So one of the most powerful aspects of open knowledge is how it can remove barriers. So my question would you like to remember what my I don't remember what I said for this. Okay. Oh right. Okay. — Let me ask the question. — My notes are in. Yeah. — Um can you share a moment when OCW helped you overcome a challenge whether academic, financial, personal or something related to access? — Sure. Um, one challenge that I think just two challenges really fast. One is the uh public discourse around higher education and to be clear I work for a public institution, right? So we are supposed to be serving the entire public. Um but the public discourse around higher education and it's been I don't know 20 years about just oh go to college and get a better job. — That's it. Which is not the function of public higher education historically and not what I believe or not only what I believe. So just the fact that OCW exists. Thank you. Keep doing this. Okay. The other one and the other one is really small for my student for my classes because um are really micro not small is that um it's probably not a stretch to say most MIT students are good at school. Yeah. Um my students maybe do not come in a lot of them thinking they are good at school. A lot of my students have come in with people telling them that they are not good at school that they are bad at many things. And um so when I teach this class in particular and I tell them look these materials came from a graduate class at MIT and yes you guys can do this too and I mean I have to scaffold I have to you know give them other support which is normal because they're 18. Um they're like what? Sorry. — How many consulting firms have you worked at? None. Okay. Um — not yet. Not yet. Well, that's it. Not yet. Right. But they're like, "What? I can What? I can do this? " Yeah. Of course you can. Yes. You can do a whole lot more than you think you can. You can do more than people have told you can. — Yes. — So, yeah. — Thank you. — Yeah. That's huge. — Um, I love the idea that open courseware is a yes, you can. — Yeah. — I love that. — We might have to put that on some swag. That's good. — Andrea, how about you? What barriers has open courseware removed for you? — Gosh. So, and not just for me, for so many of the people I mentor as well. So, I talked about, you know, having these um asynchronous uh courses and materials available meant that I could get the material that I wanted on the timeline that I wanted anywhere. So, anytime, anywhere, 100% free as Hinata highlighted. And it was important not just for my journey, but now that I'm getting to mentor other veterans, service members, underrepresented, non-traditional applicants, you know, getting to tell them, hey, it's okay if you work strange hours or you travel a lot or, you know, money is tight. you can take worldclass courses to prepare for whatever is next for you, whether you're going straight into the workforce or whether you're going into an academic program. Um, and it's because of open courseware. And you know, it also means something to the people who are applying to these selective academic programs to put on their application that they're preparing using open courseware courses. people recognize open courseware for how high quality it is and what it means to be an independent learner taking those courses. And so a lot of the people that I've had the opportunity to mentor have been accepted to these very selective programs having used open courseware to help get themselves there. And if I can jump on what Elizabeth said as well also that attitude of hey this is from MIT the number one engineering school in the world. you've taken this course from this number one engineering school in the world. Yes, you can learn at that level. You can be at institutions like this. So removing mental barrier I think is also critical. — Thank you Victor. Has OCW helped remove any barriers for you or your students? Like I said earlier, uh the first thing is that it's made my students even including myself to kind of learn from the best professors. Even though you're not having physical contact with them, but from the materials you created, you have been learning from the best of the best. Yeah, that's the first thing. So you are getting exposed to knowledge that um that MIT students are having. uh and so that alone changed the understanding of the students and secondly what it did was also to make them to understand uh the global market when you see the content that's preparing student for global market and you are using the it makes to understand you're not just trying to get ready for the market in your country but you're getting ready for the market a global market so this barriers of entering the global market was removed because when they go through the content it makes them really ready for a global market. So that was one of the biggest barriers it's remote and making them to see the kind of difficulty that uh the best university in engineering like mentioned by Henry the kind of difficulty the kind of problems they give to their students. So when you do that your confidence level goes up and then you become more confident that if they can do that and you are doing it here then that means you are fine that means you can compete anywhere in the world. So confidence level increased and also they get ready for global market. Thank you. That's so um interesting that the common theme that we've heard so far um is lifting the confidence barrier that it's a confidence enabler. That's so interesting. — Um we might circle back to Hinata after we fix our technical problems but um I'd like to move us on to the next question and this is unexpected impacts and surprises. So OCW has a way of surprising us. I know it surprised me when I saw the job opening online 11 years ago. I was like, "This can't be real. Like, OCW we can't be like giving this away for free. " So, the very premise of it surprised me. — And I'd love to hear from each of you how OCW has created surprise connections, a new way of thinking. However you want to take this, I'd love to hear. Um, Hinata, are you too freshly backed? Do you need a second to settle in? — I mean, um, okay, — I'll answer your first question like Okay. So, — we were talking about barriers to entry, right? So, uh, my high school, I go to a really good high school, um, in John's Creek, Georgia. It's one of most affluent suburbs in Georgia. So um we have a lot of programs in med and business and you know everything you can imagine except for really niche topics like urban planning and I was really passionate in urban planning but I couldn't pursue it in all my years of high school. I took all these AP classes and dual enrollment class I can't find one that's like actually good about urban planning and so through open courseware I think like the barrier to entry to you know more niche topics more specialized topics that is also a lot easier to enter now so I think that's how and could you repeat your second question for me again — sure it's a really fun one so in what ways has OCW surprised you — well um aside from me being the only high schooler in this room I think in the MIT, Harvard. Yeah. Um it's really surprising like um I've been able to talk to these so many uh accomplished people and I've been able to learn from so many of them — and I feel like the connections I've gained just through these past two days is really really important and I want to continue that as well. So through open course where yeah just want to keep on learning and then also just keep on growing my network and then hopefully I'll be able to keep growing as a person myself too. — Yeah, — maybe I'll be at MIT or Harvard. Yeah, — I'm sure you will be. hopefully. — So, I'm hearing all sorts of things about connections and access and confidence. These are really — getting at the heart of why we do what we do. Elizabeth, any surprises for you? — Huge surprise. Um, through my getting involved with OCW, Sarah and I developed a friendship for the last like we were actual friends in real life. — Yeah. — Huh. — Yeah. That was a really nice — It's pretty It's a really wonderful surprise. — Yeah, open education is a great connector. — Um, our collaborations and engagement senior manager Shira Seagull is in the audience and she can attest to the power of connecting people across institutions through open education. — Victor, any surprises? — Oh, well, I will say I can't say surprises really. So what I can just say is like uh the opportunities it bring to people. — Yeah. — Uh I remember I have one undergrad students that wanted to do his postgrad at MIT. Okay. — And so because he knew he was interested in doing his postgrad at MIT, he started using OCW to prepare. So that he came out as a very brilliant student, one of the best students during that session. But because he already followed the OCW, the MIT materials, he was already getting set for the MIT environment. So easily got his admission to MIT and was able to cope well during his masters program. So I see this as giving knowledge to everybody wherever you are in the world and helping you to have access. — Yeah. To access. So I think it's not a surprise but it's I say a very good opportunity and I see as a very good contribution to the world. Yeah. Thank you. — Very true. Thank you, Andrea. Any surprises for you? — You know, sir, I have to echo what you said earlier. The fact that such a program exists is incredible. Yeah. — Um it shouldn't surprise me any more given all the wonderful things that open courseware does. But you know seeing uh you know Hinata kind of the spec specificity of some of the courses on there the uniqueness continues to impress me and I love uh there's so many stories. You know we're a small sample of the people who were impacted by open courseware. So getting to hear those little snippets, those little stories of uh the real world impact of the program is always amazing. Um being up myself and I saw that Hinata was working on his pilot's license, which is fantastic. I'm very biased, you know, being a pilot. I'm always excited to see other people learning to fly. Uh as I was reading his bio, I thought, "Huh, I wonder. " and I searched for pilot training on open courseware and sure enough I found uh Philantina's ground school course on open courseware. So on open courseware you can take private pilot ground school train from two not just instructor pilots but they are also PhDs from MIT — and that is an incredible thing I think uh anybody training to be to take that course uh if for no other reason than just bragging that that's where you took you know grad school was at MIT from those incredible instructors. Yeah, I recommend it. Um I was I took my uh private pilot written two days ago before getting on the plane and uh MIT helped me pass it. Yeah. So I'm one. — Congratulations. That's fantastic. — We'll have to fly together someday. — I hope so. — Cool. — Oh gosh. When I was flying here last night, the pilot had to reboot the plane and he said, "Just a second while we control altdelete and I feel like I should take this course so I have a better understanding of what that means for my safety. " — It's fine. I made it. — Okay. Um, let's think about the future. — Yeah. would love to hear from each of you what open education should look like in the future. — Okay. Well, I could I have a really I in the interest of time I am because we were supposed to finish five minutes ago, right? Yeah. — Oh, we have 45 minutes. — Woohoo. Never mind. Oh, we have an hour. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. Um what like a professor wanting to talk more? What? Um two things. One is that um again it kind of goes with it being at school or being good not good at school and teaching everybody, right? Because I teach the whole range of the world comes through my classes which is one of the reasons that I absolutely love my job. Um but sometimes taking what one professor has done and then trying to use it again is a lot of work, right? and also taking what one professor has done for excuse me for a web particular audience um I was really influenced by Maad talk here at I can't remember the name of the department that does your teacher training stuff uh that Sarah invited me to see on Zoom um well during lockdown and um one thing I've learned from learning about equitable teaching is that really making things finding ways for students to connect these things they may never have heard of or thought about to their lives, to their values, to their communities, to their goals is really important. — Um, and a lot of times they don't even know how to do that. You know, they don't even they can't see. And I mean, I can I can, you know, tell them examples from my, you know, white middle class life. Yay. But um to have you know to have examples of to have ways to show to ask them the questions to way be about how this go how they could use these things to have examples you know um so that they can figure out ways to better learn this right and then to go out and make the world a better place because when I ask my students that their eyes like so how are you going to make the world a better place and their eyes get really big they're like what? That's why I'm in school. I mean, yeah, that's why you're in school. — Yeah. — Whether you know it or not. And the other thing is just to um keep leading with courage. You may not quite be aware, but that has a huge effect on the rest of us to see that. — I think something you're saying speaks to something I've always believed, and that's that people power open. — You can give access to the materials, but it's the people using them and the people teaching with them that really — power them. Yeah. — So, we need to continue to support those people and to learn from them. — Victor, open education, what should it look like in the future? — Well, we're in the age of AI and uh so it means that things have to evolve. The content alone may not be enough. Uh why you said a very important thing that is more about people using it to teach and learn. So I think also we need to begin to see the integration of hair into open education. I don't know how to put it but in such a way that can be that kind of um uh personalized effect coming up. I don't know. Yeah. But those are the things I'm thinking about because that will make it more interesting because content alone is not enough today. Yeah. So you will begin to see people not paying attention to just content. they want to pay attention to what guides them and help them to uh understand the content better and more so to understand the content they need to get uh they need to use. So — in open education design you have to be looking at how we bring in AI and still ensure as we making content available at the same time we are making sure that the experience is getting personalized and enhanced. So I think that is what we should begin to look at the experience the learning experience in using open uh education open res open education resources. So how can he help us to enhance that experience and so doesn't go doesn't mean only content sharing but it goes beyond that and then we can also learn more from the learners. Yeah that's my those are my thoughts for now. Yeah, thank you for sharing that and come back for the 3:15 session where Dimmitri is going to talk about the future of open learning and he's already and our team is already thinking about some of the things you've just mentioned. So, the future is NAS. Okay, Andrea, what should the future look like? Yeah, I'm going to hop on what uh Elizabeth said earlier about, you know, considering how we've always done things and how we should do things going forward and what Victor said about incorporating AI into, you know, how do we present the information or um you know, what tools are created to help people learn. So, we've I I'm sure Victor's way more experienced in this area than I am, but there's been research that shows, you know, — certain uses of generative AI tools can actually inhibit learning and information retention because they don't allow students to kind of struggle with the learning process. And there's there's — u growth in a certain amount of struggle, but you don't want them to get to the point that now they're discouraged. You want that confidence. you want them to know, yes, they can succeed at this level of programming. So, I think there's going to be a lot of uh development there. It sounds like uh I'm excited for the 315 to hear what you guys are already doing — in that vein. And then um I'd also be interested in seeing uh you know we've got a lot of learners who are across the spectrum in terms of demographics and that's any demographics its age. You know it's so cool to see Hanada here and talk about using open courseware as a high school student. I'd love to see, you know, open course were incorporated at pretty much any level of learning from, you know, I don't think it's a stretch to say that, you know, elementary school students can learn from some of these courses and I don't think it's any stretch to say that, you know, people who've been doing research for decades can learn from these courses as well. So, both the way that we present information and the demograph demographic of people that are using it is kind of what I'm hoping to see. Thank you, Hinatada. In some ways, you are our future and so I'm curious what future you want to step into and how open education will be a part of it. — Yeah. No pressure though. — Yeah. I know — there's a lot of Yeah. But — um for the future, well uh me personally, my goal is to become like a pilot, but also being able to do more than just being a pilot, right? Um I have a lot of different passions. I'm a naturally curious guy. So, um, well, being able to pursue all of my passions like urban planning and stuff like that on my off time. Um, so because being a pilot, I'm going to be everywhere. I'm not going to be able to commit to, you know, going to school for two years, four years and continuing my education. So, maybe opening up access um or keep opening up access to everybody like that um would be a great future for open courseware. And yeah, being able to use that to, you know, tickle my curiosity, you know, keep on pursuing what I like and yeah, like that's a good future. — Great. So, we have a few minutes if anyone would like to ask a question to the educators or learners that are sharing their time. I will repeat your questions so they can hear it through my mic. Um, yes, we have. — Oh, we have a mic coming. One moment. Here it comes. — Thank you. Uh this has been an interesting talk. Uh and speaking to the issue of obstacles that have been overcome and continue to be overcome. Uh open courseware has done a lot to breach the obstacles of economics and geography. But we are in a world that is increasingly being siloed. And I see a lot of open courseware and education in general going to people who already recognize and respect education. And there's another group that rejects education as being partisan, which education is not. And I'm wondering what is being done and can be done to reach to people with either ideological differences to help them understand how useful and important education is or who don't have mentors or other people to encourage them and therefore don't even know to look for the resources we have. — So I can share one example. Uh we created a podcast uh a special season of the Chuck radio podcast which focused solely on learner voices and the two hosts one was from Memphis Tennessee and one was from Kala Uganda. They talked openly about how learning out in the open was not necessarily safe for them in their communities and learners hearing from them saying that is way more powerful than anyone from our institution trying to say that. So I think one strategic thing we can do is to continue to put the spotlight on the actual users of open courseware and open learning to share their stories in their own words to touch people all over the world in all sorts of different circumstances. Anything else? Yes. If you were to change one thing for OCW, what would that be? — It's a hard question, but um — that's why I'm a professor, — right? You're right. — Yeah. — I don't know. It's pretty good how it is. I like it. I don't have an answer for you. — that because I'm really my exposure with it is really limited, right? Like my one class has been fantastic, but nothing to nothing new to add to that. Yeah. — Okay. Andrea or Victor, what would you change about Oakman courseware to improve it? I already know what Victor is going to say. — Go ahead. — Uh, so for me, uh, it's more about it's not about the content. It's more about making the navigation easy — for people to be able to easily discover what they are looking for. — Yeah. I mean not just for um people in the university but I mean anybody that jumps on the platform should be able to easily find something that relates to his query. So I think is more about how do we facilitate that interaction with the system for you to know that there are resources there are treasures here. So because if you don't know there are treasures there you won't go there. — Yeah. — Uh so how do we make sure people can understand and search and know that there are treasures they can get from that platform. So I think that is one. The second will be like going forward uh how do we ensure that the content are created in such a way that we have a consideration for different demography and also different geography. Uh so apart from just we recorded video or we put the materials we are looking at uh the the models or people have access all over the world. So how do we ensure that the majority can actually follow the content anywhere they're coming from. — It's not an easy uh one to do. There's a lot of work to do it. But I think if we want more adoption, we need to be thinking beyond we just record or put it there, but to begin to look at where the demography and the geography of access and how do we make it more relevant to them. Yeah. Thank you. — Thank you. — It's kind of a copout to say I just want more. It's as wide of a breadth of topics as are available in open courseware. There's constantly new issues popping up, new discussions in just within STEM, you know, Victor's field of AI. I swear every day there's a new critical paper that fundamentally changes, you know, how we're looking at training models, uh evaluating them, how we're looking at creating certificates of guarantees, and uh I know that's extremely challenging. There's time investment, there's resource investment, things like that. Um uh to kind of uh again jump on Victor's what Victor said, I think a lot of the tools that are uh coming up in terms of AI are going to make the accessibility easier. So meeting people with where they're at in terms of how they learn um what languages they speak or you know if they're uh sign language uh users. Um, so it'll be really amazing to see, you know, that development again. I think at 3:15 we're probably gonna um see a lot of what that looks like and I'm excited to see that. — Thank you. I think we have time for one more. TJ, hi. — Okay, great. I'll make it an easy one. So uh this question this is this panel has shown an example of how people are using finding value in MIT open courseware without needing the value of the credential right it's going to lead to something you have plans but you find great intrinsic value in the content so a two-part question one for Hinata and Andreas how do you plan to communicate with future employer or or educational institution the value that you receive from these that's a big challenge that somebody mentioned earlier is how do we communicate industry hasn't really adapted fully to recognizing all types of learning right they're still waiting for that degree or that credential and the second question is this a problem this may be for everybody is this credentiing problem and communication of this value to employers and others is that something that MIT open courseware MIT itself needs to solve or should somebody else be working on that I just who should be solving for that problem and what should we be doing with it? — Yeah, I think I have a good answer for that. Um, I was doing college applications cuz I'm a high school senior. I'm sure if you have kids or, you know, if you know anyone that's applying to colleges, they probably struggle with the same thing. But, um, I took all these, you know, MIT open courseware courses. I worked really hard, but I didn't put it on my application. And you might ask why, like, you know, it's MIT, like you probably should put down an app. But the reason why I didn't is because I think all my other achievements will speak for that value that MIT has given me. I don't have to necessarily cite that I did MIT courses. — So like you know for the private pilot written I was talking about earlier, right? I took these MIT courses but the proof that or I guess the value the credentials are my results on that test. It's not if I took it or not. It's like you don't credit the baseball bat that you use to hit the home run. You So it doesn't matter. Does that make sense? Yeah. — Yeah. That's a great analogy. — Thank you. Yeah, I think Hinata hits on a kind of a key point. It's not that you took the course, it's what en it enabled you to do. So, there has to be some litmus test of, you know, what your capabilities are. And I think that's kind of universal. Just because you have a degree from someplace doesn't mean necessarily um that you have the same capabilities as somebody getting the same degree from someplace else or somebody who just you know did extra work in class or outside of class. So I think it's asking a lot personally of open courseworks who be able to do such a I think a very narrow assessment of ability to apply knowledge because I think it's going to be so job specific um so area specific so role specific so I think it's going to have to kind of be left up to you know the people evaluating the individual's capility for that specific role. Um, but I agree with Hanata very much that there has to be a measure of outcome, not just the fact that you check the box and you take the court. — Interesting. Um, so the second part of TJ's question, Dimmitri, I'm wondering if you would like to speak to that to how we're thinking about MIT's role in workforce credentiing and open learning. We'll have an opportunity to talk at later at 3:15. But um as you perhaps know MIT had um led the effort with uh digital credentials which uh in fact um has led uh few months ago to an actual digital credential. They studied u the group that worked on that studied the principles together with our engineering team. they have developed um an actual digital credential that is now in use um in the MIT PL in the learn MIT platform. We plan to continue um you know the development of this not as concepts uh but rather we are investing in the effort and um my hope is that this will be further enhanced. Uh it's still ongoing. I think the jury is not yet uh but we are definitely have um included in our thinking the development of credentials um within open learning. Uh it is part of our strategy. — Thank you. — I have one right here. — Oh, Brandon has an example. — So, so this is the credential that Demetri was just talking about that I'm carrying with me on my phone — from Annabelle's course. — Wow. Thank you. this wonderful. I would like to thank all of the panelists for joining us. Um, I learned a lot from you. I hope all of you learned a lot. Thank you for participating in the conversation. I think it captures everything that is foundational to open courseware, curiosity, impact, and people powering open. So, thank you and I hope to see you more as the day unfolds. Thank you. And uh we will reconvene at uh 1 pm Eastern time with a uh with a session about the other opens beyond open education. Uh really looking forward to that session. I know. Ah. Heat. Hey, heat. Heat. hey, hey. Heat. Heat. Hey, Heat. Hey. Heat. hey, hey. Heat. Hey. I don't know. Heat. N. Down. Heat. N. Oh, hey. Heat. N. Hey, Back down. Hey Bonnie Berry. By now, B Heat. Hey, hey. Heat. N. Everybody. Hey. Heat. N. hey, hey. Hey. Heat. N. Hey. Heat. I know. Heat. Hey, hey. Heat. Hey. Hey. Heat. Heat. See, Heat. In any particular order? — No particular order. You guys should — Yeah, it's a nice Are we rolling? — We're rolling. Okay. Well, good afternoon. Welcome back from lunch. Uh I'm thrilled to have you here for our next session. Um, knowledge without walls, MIT's ethos of open. This session brings together leaders from across the institute to explore a core part of MIT's identity, the belief that knowledge should be shared widely, freely, and responsibly for the benefit of all. The open education movement is frankly inseparable from these other threads of open knowledge manifest here. We are braided together and stronger together when we collaborate across open access, open publishing, open science. And so we'll hear this afternoon from several of these key leaders how this ethos of open is evolving and where we might go from here. Like to introduce Amy Brand is a leader in scholarly publishing, open access and knowledge dissemination. She's the director of the MIT Press, which is one of the largest university presses in the world and an important figure in open access publishing. The MIT Press is well known for its publications in emerging fields of scholarship and its p pioneering use of technology. Chris Borg is the director of libraries at MIT and a national advocate for equitable access to knowledge. She's the founding director of the center for research on equitable and open scholarship here at MIT. Rebecca Saxs is the John W. Jarv Jarva — Jary — Jarvy professor of cognitive neuroscience and the associate dean of science at MIT. She's the associ she is an associate investigator at the McGovern Institute and her work has advanced transparency and openness in scientific research. So, thank you for joining me here. Um let's dive right in. Um like to start with a question about the way that values drive this work and MIT's leadership and open knowledge seems to be driven from deeply held values around openness in teaching, publishing and collaboration. So Amy, what motivates your commitment to openness and the work you do at the press? — Um well, first of all, I just want to say thank you. It's an honor to be part of this wonderful celebration of 25 years of open courseware. Um I well I first came to MIT in the mid80s not to date myself as a grad student and always experienced this place as you know very open-minded open doors you know people who don't stand on ceremony. Um and that's part of what I've loved about it and has kept me coming back you know most recently to this as role as director of the press. uh and you know we have always kind of embodied those open values. We did our first open access book back in 1995 um and that work has continued to grow and our first open journal um in 2000. But you know to answer your question more directly it's just you know it's really a belief that to serve as a publisher our authors our readers you know we want to provide the deepest impact of their work the widest possible audience and open models are the way to do that. — Thank you. Thank you Chris. Libraries are such a longunning champion for open and equitable access. what uh what drives your work here? — Yeah, and I'll echo what Amy said. It's just a privilege to be here and to be part of this celebration. So, thank you for inviting us. But um you know, I was initially drawn to a career in libraries because libraries are sort of the perfect example of public community infrastructure, right? Like it's this public space and service that's open to anyone in the community. It's like whole point is to open up equitable access to information, to books, to tools, to people. Um, you know, and that's just that's uh very appealing to me and is part of what drew me into um libraries. But I'll also say that I mean access to education, public education, qu high quality public education, access to books, access eventually access to databases and online journals made a huge difference in my life and my career path. And so I'm motivated to make sure that is available to others as well. And so the work we do in the libraries, you know, sort of fits that for me. um you know to be able to do that at a place like MIT we're talking about values literally open is written into our value statement um and I will quote we champion the open sharing of information and ideas like to work at a place that actually states that as clearly as that is I think for me a real privilege. Um it also carries some responsibility I think to do it as well and as broadly as we can to make what we do here available to the world. — Thank you. — Yeah. Rebecca you know across kind of the whole research enterprise certainly in your field of neuroscience but well beyond that um what's driving your commitment to open? Yeah, I think and I'll just start again saying thank you so much for having me. — Um, and I strongly share the sense that you started with that this is about values. So for me thinking about what it is to be a scientist, why I'm a scientist. Um, the core of that is a set of ideals of what it what science is, right? Science is um the freedom we have to make true discoveries and to turn them into useful knowledge. And I think this core definition of science um requires openness. Right? So what do we mean by true? Right? That's a there's a long philosophy of science trying to figure out what is truth. And a current view is that one of the things about truth is standing up to scrutiny. Right? Being open to scrutiny from as many perspectives as possible. And so to constitute a true discovery means to be open to the most rigorous scrutiny you can be. So openness is core to that. And then similarly when we say we want to make useful discoveries, we want the things that we discover to have lives beyond the moment of discovery. Whether that's in cumulative reuse and expanding the next part of the conversation, opening new questions, or whether it's in the sense of applications in engineering and technology or in policy and society, all of those forms of use require that somebody be able to have access to your discovery, right? If you're keeping it private, then it can't be used for any of those purposes. So it feels to me that the openness of the work that we do is just a fundamental core backbone of what it would mean to be a scientist and live up to our ideals. — Wonderful. Thank you. Yeah. Um I think those are really powerful perspectives and it's great to know, you know, the sort of intrinsic deep roots of this work help keep us motivated and aligned on all this. Um, I'm curious how living these values, you know, sometimes can say shift or change or transform the work that we're doing. Um, you know, new things that it might open up, whether it's around, you know, different forms of access or, you know, other ways to provide this sort of transparency. um and in the work you're doing, what um what changes have you witnessed in trying to do this work? Chris, you want to start us off with that? Yeah, I mean one of the things that's changed about how we do this work at the MIT libraries is um how do I say this delicately present company accepted uh learning that many faculty who are brilliant in their own fields undoubtedly and brilliant in many ways actually don't have a very deep understanding of how scholarly publishing works right and many of their perspectives on many of them think that the closed system of scholarly publishing is not the right system. But they have uh solutions that are more based on anecdotes and assumptions than on rigorous examination of um behavior and incentives. Um so one of the things that changed here for us is that we did launch this center for research in equitable and open scholarship so that we could meet the challenges of um sort of reinventing scholarly sharing um based on actual data and actual information about what motivates people, what are the economics of this. Um, so we launched that um in 2019 and continue to work on trying to bring in research funding to really answer some of the nutty the really hard questions. — Good. Um Oops. Um Amy, anything come to mind for you there? Yeah, I was thinking as I was watching the wonderful documentary earlier um about the way in which open courseware has had an impact so far beyond MIT and certainly in terms of the learners that it's reached but also in terms of the way it's impacted what other universities do and how they and that really has been I think you know in the last several years for us coming up with replicable sustainable open models that we sort of trial at MIT press. We do a lot of experimentation, a lot of innovation and then you know see go out into the watch world you know and get picked up elsewhere. So um you know we innovated a model for open monograph publishing um with support of a very generous funer and um have not only been able to publish all of our books open access as a result but we see others and so I think you know it's that value of openness and also being at a place like MIT is about having kind of leadership here that goes beyond just what we do you know at the press. talk about other examples, but — yeah, we'll come back. Um, how about for you, Rebecca? What's uh what's been helping support and drive the progress and the changes that you're seeing here in open science? — Yeah. Well, so connected to all of these, there's so many things you could say because the landscape is changing so much so fast. Um in terms of thinking about how scientists share the process of their knowledge, um the means for sharing the options for how you might share your science have, you know, exploded over the time. I've been faculty at MIT for nearly 20 years. And in those 20 years, the ways in which scientists could communicate their science have exploded. So, you know, it's now possible to fully film protocols and share them as video protocols. It's possible to share enormous data sets, all of which are hosted online. It's, you know, possible to share them in much more well-managed, you know, with better metadata so they can be reused better. It's possible to think of what you're doing as contributing to the um text analysis in addition to the readers of the work. So just you know and protocols can be shared in implementable forms for any work that's being done computationally. there's GitHub and hugging face just like an incredible explosion of tools for sharing the parts of our scientific work. Um and so that creates a huge number of opportunities um and some I know we'll come to challenges in terms of uh teaching these pra instantiating the practices teaching the practices making sure our students are at the cutting edge of all of these practices um incentivizing them through policies and recognition. Um so yeah I think in both in my own lab and then in our department there have been a huge number of new tools created actually many of them have already gone through the full cycle of being created and adopted and then died and obsolete became obsolete you know there's a very fast turn right now I think in tools available for ways of communicating science um more openly though often then you have to figure out are they open in the ways that you wanted them to be. Um so this has created many opportunities and I'll just say briefly that the one opportunity that connects to everything we're saying here is um I've started teaching a core class to the graduate students in our department. Um which is the whole point of the class is on how to use contemporary tools to make science more true and useful through making it more rigorous and transparent. Right? So all tied up in using these tools for openness. um teaching a class like that. It's the class that I have on open courseware. And when I was invited to put it on Open Courseware, I hesitated at the time because I changed that class every year because the tools are different every year. I can't this year teach last year's tools. Some of them have been completely superseded. Some of them, you know, are already obsolete. So, it's a huge opportunity to stay up to date to make sure my students are staying up to date. Um, and also kind of overwhelming to realize that I'm reconstructing this curriculum every year to meet the changes. Um, and just to highlight what Amy said, yesterday I taught scientific publishing in this class and we had visit us the editor of a diamond open access journal hosted by MIT Press who was talking about how diamond open access models are changing right now as opposed to when I started this class four years ago. — Okay. Yeah. The name of that course is tools for robust science. You'll find that on open courseware. Um and uh we should follow up on updating that version here pretty soon. Yeah. Um, one of the great things about getting these different perspectives and braiding them together, as I talked about at the beginning, is seeing the themes emerge. And I'm hearing maybe a couple of themes here already about like how do we communicate to our broader sort of communities, you know, what are these values and why do it and also maybe sharing some of the best practices around methods and tools and just as kind of an open question, you know, around those sort of themes, you know, what are what are you seeing what are we seeing collectively around how we message this build support and how, you how to think about sharing sort of tools, expertise. Anyone care to jump in on those? — Um, it was interesting that you commented on, you know, your students who had developed new solutions that sort of went through the whole life cycle. I mean, we've, you know, we've certainly been there at the MIT Press, too. Um, you know, I but I continue to see sort of a very robust, like Rebecca, creative space around open infrastructure and open tools. Um, and I'm seeing a lot more kind of crossun university partnerships in those areas. Um, but you know, it's just yeah, often these are grant funded projects. So that's definitely an issue. Um, and I mean it's I don't know many people that teach the kind of course that you teach, but that's terrific. Yeah, I was going to say maybe the same thing if we're heading into communication challenges is I think um there's a robust core of people who are activated and passionate and knowledgeable and really see this as central to their work and the challenge has been expanding these practices to become the default or the standard. Right? I am finding it frustrating teaching this class for the fourth or fifth time to that many of my students are still encountering this material for the first time from me and of course they're new students. They're not the same students as four years ago. The but I I sort of hoped my whole course would be obsolete within seven years. You know that the whole question of open science would come to just be science and I could move on to teaching something else. Um, and so and to that's not happening as much and as fast as I would want it to. And that feels to me like the challenge is not knowledge creation or innovation or tool development. All of that is happening incredibly powerfully with people for whom that is their core passion. Um, what I see as the major challenge is disseminating all of those tools until their default for people for whom it is not their passion. so that they're using it without thinking about it the way that they're currently using the terribly broken old systems right now. — Yeah. So, if I can build off that, I mean, I think Rebecca's always right, but she's right on this, too. Um, you know, there is a core of people who are incredibly passionate and work on, you know, create classes and work on infrastructure and so forth. Uh one of the things that we found in a couple of different research projects that we've done through Creos is that actually support for open science practices is generally high. If you ask people their attitudes about it, people faculty everyone says yeah sure I think sharing data is really a good idea. Sharing code great sharing my research openly I believe in that. Then you look at behavior and it lags far behind that, right? And so that the challenge is getting people to act on their beliefs because you I think what happens is when the rubber hits the road, is that how that expression goes? Is that the right Okay. Um you know, people are making choices, scholars are making choices um to uh I'll stick with journal articles. are making choices to publish their journal article in the venue that they think will give them the most prestige, right? And will help their career the most or will help their um co-authors, you know, more junior co-authors careers. Um so getting that behavioral change has been a sticking point because the incentives I think are misaligned for many faculty to turn that into a positive. I we are also seeing some movement among early career scholars who really are committed to behaving differently and to truly sharing their stuff openly and um the MIT's graduate student council recently passed a resolution on scientific publishing um where among other things they said uh what did they say? I had the note somewhere. Anyway, it was all in support of open scholarship and specifically they called out that they wanted scholars and their faculty to be evaluated on scientific merit not on you know the name of the journal or H index or whatever um and that science should be shared openly. So I'm seeing that um you know the junior scholars are sort of pushing the um pushing for better behavior or more open sharing of research. So, — it's a challenge, but I I'm choosing to believe this is a turning point. We need you know we need different more new incentives and you know other than where did you publish you know there's work underway to develop a data sharing index that people can use the same way they use age index things like that but I also think the um the dspace repository is a great example too because you know MIT's been very successful in getting faculty I think more than other institutions to open their work Yeah, through the repository. — I mean, yeah, just to riff off that, I mean, MIT has one of had one of the first uh all faculty open access policies, which uh gives MIT uh the right to distribute faculty journal articles freely and openly to the world. Um, which we do through DSpace, which was also invented here at MIT before my time. But, um, and we do that through DSpace. And I I'm going to get the number wrong, but at present we have over 60% of faculty articles that have been published since that policy was passed are openly available in DSpace, which whenever I give talks, I always claim that's the highest percentage of any US university. And no one has contradicted me. Um, but no one but no one keeps there's no stats on it any there's no like — uh nobody shares their stats on it but nobody's contradicted me that we're at the highest and that's in part because faculty self-deposit but it's also because we in the libraries resource the work to go and get those articles so that faculty don't have to find the right one to deposit. Um, so we resource the work to make uh MIT scholarship available online and openly. — Can I tell a story riffing off what Chris? — Well, just a minute ago when you were saying we've done research on support for open scholarship at MIT. Um, part of that research was work Chris and I did together and um was a really fun opportunity to pair uh Creos and um my role as associate dean of science because it so there is a robust field of meta-cience which studies support for open practices among scientists generally and the practice there is typically to survey scientists and ask them how much do you support these following open practices? um and that literature reports across US scientists high support for open practices but very low participation in the surveys right so out of all the people invited to participate in the survey 15 to 20% of the people participated and that reported very high support for open science and so that I have always been bothered by that I don't know whether scientists are really into open science or whether the 15% of scientists to answer a request to participate in a survey about open science are really into open science. That's a very different number. And the question of whether what we're facing is pluralistic ignorance or genuine opposition is completely unanswerable when you have 15% of people responding to your survey. Um so Chris and I concocted a research program together in which we would ask the same survey questions. So what's your support for open science? But using two different recruitment methods. So one was the same thing. We sent an email to all the scientists in the school of science at MIT. Well, in five departments MIT and just opt in are you how what's your support for open science and we got 20% participation rate very standard and the support for open science was very high in this 20%. Um and then we took a random sample of labs in the same departments and I wrote to them and I said in my capacity as associate dean I want to visit your lab. Can I come to your lab meeting? And everybody said yes. and I said, "Thank you for inviting me to your lab meeting. Before we get started, I want you to do this survey. " So, I got 95% participation rate. Okay? I believe this is the only meta-cience experiment that's ever had 95% participation rate. Right? So, we had incredibly representative samples. And the question was in this representative sample where now basically you were coerced to answer our questions about open science, what would the support for open science be? So, can I do audience participation? Okay. So the standard rate of support for open science is like 85 90% in the optin right the people who chose to answer this question. So who thinks that in the representative sample of open science I'm going to ask you to raise your hand we got so 20% participation I'm going to go up from here who thinks that it was only 20%. So approximately the people who would have opted in or more 20% or more. Everybody's got to raise their hands. Not less than 20% guys. Okay lower your hand if you think it was only 20%. So if your hands up, you think it was more than 20%. Okay? If your hands still up, you think it was more than 40%. If your hands up, you think it was more than 60%. If your hands up, you think it was more than 80%. So that is the percent support for open science was the same in the representative sample as in the opt-in sample. Sue knows the answer. — Yeah, — it was the same. The support for open science was above 80% in the representative sample. So then when we wrote this paper, we had to say either support for open science is very high everywhere or it's very high at MIT. — Either finding is good. — Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating to to hear some of these details and think about what are the things that get in the way of translating those values into practice, you know, and I think, you know, each of you is doing some really interesting things. curious if we might just lean into that a little bit more and you know just talk and share a little bit about how are we working to bridge that gap between the values and the practice here and what might be a really like exciting opportunity I know to let people know about — um I mean the you know this indirectly gets to that question of challenges that you said you were you know we were going to raise and um you know we're running a business right with a hundred or so staff to support and um but a very clear mission. We're not like commercial publishers and it's you know it's an ongoing challenge to be as open as we want to be um and to sustain what we do. — Um but you know I've been really excited about the success of as I think I mentioned our open books model. It's a model in which um we have a collective subsidy from hundreds of institutions around the world and they each contribute a pretty modest amount and if we reach a threshold contribution level we can open up all the books you know and and that's been going strong for several years now and it it's had you know lots of copycat models at other presses. So that that's a that's I think a really good example. Um another um was early in the pandemic we you know recognized that the explosion in preprint publishing around corona virus which you know made very good sense that science was you know wanted to publish people wanted to publish as quickly as possible um to address this incredible public health crisis um that there was some public misunderstanding and media misunderstanding around you know whether or not this content had been peer- reviewviewed. And so we stood up as a public service a very rapid uh peerreview overlay model that was one of the first and is also we're seeing that spread and I see a lot of I think that's a very promising future for journal publishing you know it's kind of publish curate where you use existing um open repositories whether they're institutional or field-based like the archive or bioarchchive and then layer peer review and other forms of curation on top of it. So — I think so the sticking point that I see is the one that um Chris described which is our collective perceptions of prestige and merit, right? How do we evaluate the merit of a scientist and um that so there the topic of how we actually evaluate the merit of a scientist and how we expect the merit of a scientist to be evaluated. There's a lot of very persistent myths that are hard to undo. So, for example, in the um graduate student council resolution that Chris referred to, they call on MIT to evaluate scientists by their scientific merit and not by bad proxies like H indexes and journal names. So, I will say I know because I do these cases, right? I both see and present promotion cases for the school of science. I've seen all the cases that have been presented in the last five years. No one has ever mentioned an H index. So on the one hand they're trying to solve a problem that does not exist right that problem doesn't exist. On the other hand the question of journal name is much more complicated because journal name itself is not particularly prominent. We don't particularly we don't for example say this person should be promoted because they had three nature papers. That would never cross our lips. On the other hand, we are looking for impact on a field, right? So we do ask how has their work made impact on a field and there is a very complicated ecosystem by which scientific discovery especially right now we are inundated with scientific discoveries and scientific papers, right? The number of scientific papers is increasing literally exponentially and it is far beyond any human capacity to read the all the papers in their discipline. Now, it was already hard when I started 20 years ago, but it's completely impossible now. And so, there's now, as there is in every other aspect of our lives, a very dysfunctional attention economy, right, of people trying to get your attention to their work. And what you buy for an extraordinary price with the named publishers is competition in the attention economy, right? One of the things that you are literally just buying is eyes on your science. And so that is a way to pay for impact, right? More people have seen your work. Now, it's not the same as merit and excellence, right? And is unambiguous when we promote when we hire and promote people. What we talk about is the science and we evaluate it for rigor, right? Somebody who is not a rigorous and excellent scientist would never get hired and would never get promoted at MIT. That's not there's no problem there. The problem is that we also look for impact on your field. And that one I think is more intertwined with the messed up economics and the information the attention economy that's happening and harder to undo through individual choices even at the scale of an institution. Right? So I keep saying to my colleagues and my students we get to decide what we mean by excellence. Like what do you mean we're helpless in the face of these nameless incentives um to do you know to publish our places in to publish our science in um you know coercive and unethical publishing houses. and they say, "Well, we might get to decide what we mean by excellence, but impact is this faceless, nameless other that we can't do anything about, and therefore we're helpless, and therefore we have to pay $12,000 per paper. " And undermining that belief, I think that's one of the hardest problems that I'm facing. I will say I got a grant from NIH just before the new government um to that gave us three years to try to improve this in my department and in the school of science. It's specifically about policies and incentives at the scale of institutions. Um so at least a year and a half ago NIH was interested in helping fix this. Yeah. — And we did get a mention of open data sharing in the school of science eval uh like — oh yeah remember — we no these are when we evaluate excellence there's no problem we look for rigor transparency scrutiny there's no problem in our evaluation I really genuinely believe we have the right standards but it's much harder to unpeel — impact. Yeah, actually it's NIH that's funding the data sharing index project as well. So I think I mean these federal agencies are really motivated to fix this. — Well, anybody who's funding science because they want science in the interest of anything, whether it's health or innovation or discovery or policy, whatever you're funding it for, it's not in your interest to send $12,000 per paper to a private company that's making a 25% profit off of it. So, anyone who cares about the actual impact of science sees that they have to fix this problem. — That's good. We're we're leaning into some sticky structural stuff. — Chris, go. I mean, and you know, I'll also note that like, you know, one of our motivations in the library is to try and sort of what I often say is break the strangle hold of these, you know, large for-profit commercial publishers with their opaque charges and um high rent seeking. Um so uh six years ago now almost um based on their uh lack of alignment with our open ethos and our open access pol our faculty open access policy we actually cancelled our journal subscription to Elsair our thank you uh and we have been we have not had a journal subscription for six years now and you know we've tried to tell that story that you MIT has survived. Research and teaching at MIT has not ground to a halt without a subscription to Elsair. And after, you know, almost six years, we are starting to see, I mean, probably prompted also by, you know, financial crisis at many of our peer institutions, we are starting to see some of our peer institutions actually follow that lead and similarly break up with the large commercial publishers. um in many cases our breaking up with those publishers also means that we're no longer paying in bulk for publishing charges right and so now we're seeing that faculty are now faced with choices that actually impact their pocketbook I mean not really their grants or their discretionary funds but again I'm trying to be hopeful here and think that um uh I have heard faculty who've never talked to me about open publish publishing before say things like I guess I need to rethink my publishing strategy which is exactly what we want them to do right and so anyway I'm trying to be hopeful I think there's some uh something here um that again may be a turning point that between the junior scholars demanding change and the sort of financial crunch that both the institution and now individual authors are facing — um is some incentive — and related to that you know We've seen whole editorial boards from these commercial publishers jump ship and start new journals with us and — yeah — much less expensive publishing charges. — Great. — So thank you. Um final question for the panel. Um what's your hope for the future in this work and especially thinking kind of collaboratively and working in a more kind of braided fashion across these different opens. Um maybe you want to start us off on that? So um yeah, there's so much there. We're really focused and you know related to the conversation today on um figuring out our way forward with open textbooks and more partnership with open learning. We're doing we got one of the um the MIT um generative AI consortium grants um and some other funding to explore interactive AI enhanced textbooks um based on all the open publishing we're doing. And I um you know I am at the same time as a publisher who worries a lot about copyright and what these companies are doing with our content. You know that raising the question of maybe open for humans to read is not the same for open for these commercial companies to use without permission. Um you know I'm very excited about the way in which AI is um further democratizing access to information because it's not just about you know here it is you know delivered to you it's also about here it is translated for you at the level you can read it in the language all of those things so um you know figuring out the role of a university press like the MIT press in that space is challenging and exciting So — I mean I'm excited to look at um ways in which you know MIT press and the libraries and faculty can collaborate around opening up the research that comes out of some of uh MIT's recent presidential initiatives right so there's a big focus there's the climate project right there's uh the AI initiative there's quantum um heels health I never know what — health and life sciences — thank you right I mean those are places where uh you know there's been an investment in interdisciplinary work on these big real world problems and if we can work together to make sure that the output of you know and the idea is that the research in those areas would have impact more quickly and so if we can work together across the various parts of MIT that are committed to open to make sure that the fruits of those initiatives really is open in a way that is uh consumable by I think humans and machines. I think that's a game changer. — Well, I'll maybe finish exactly on topic and say what gives me the most hope for the future is the class I teach um which is again on open courseware if you want to see a version of it. But the um I'm teaching it in person right now and at the end of every class you we spend three hours per week on each of the different topics and challenges in science and how to increase transparency and rigor in that part of science. And at the end of every three hours I spend the last 10 minutes asking everybody in the room to tell me one thing, one concept or tool from that week's materials that they'll take into their practices. And while this is coerced, it is the most amazing uh mental health intervention on me because I leave every Tuesday morning at noon feeling like 18 more MIT graduate students are going to implement these practices in their lives wherever they go from here on out and that gives me hope. Yeah, I'll say um from an open courseware perspective at MIT because our mandate from day one has meant to kind of reflect across the entire curriculum and that includes advanced graduate level subjects which are so grounded in like the research academic literature. I think it's incumbent on us to continue to pay extra attention to this aspect of the open knowledge world. Um and you know we'll continue to work collaboratively with you all. So, just want to thank you for joining me here on this session. I Yeah, I think we're just at the right time for ending. Sorry, we didn't save time for questions, but maybe you can catch folks up here if you have one during the break. And I believe at 2 PM we will start our next session, which is um catalysts of open philanthropy's role in open the open education movement. So, please join me in thanking Amy, Chris, and Rebecca. I like — I want science to ask people who pretend to do something with what they got which they don't do yet. So I'm nudging them. Heat. Okay. Heat. I'm sorry. Hello. That's Okay. So I knew I mean the last thing that you said that's also the Oh, that's real. Heat. No, that's Heat. You don't want to pay for that services. Is that your birthday? Yeah. Heat. Oh my god. Heat. N. Nobody wants something. Heat. Did you see my Amen. Heat. and that heat. United States. Heat. Hello. — Oh my god. Say something interesting. Thanks. — Shall we start? Um, my name is Peter Calfman and I work at uh, open learning and I have absolutely the best job here on campus. Together with our team in resource development, I have the opportunity in fundraising to work uh with the most progressive, the most generous, the wisest, the most courageous, the most creative, the bravest, and I'm just reading the adjectives they sent me. Uh the most creative, the bravest, the h the most handsome, elegant, the strongest, most intelligent, uh the most exciting and intelligent people, the most visionary and courageous philanthropists, the most generous people in the world. of the uh thousands literally thousands of people who have given so generously to open courseware over the past 25 years. Yes. Um three people stand out as exemplars of this kind of vision. You'll find out which three in a minute. Three people stand out as exemplars of the kind of uh vision, commitment and courage uh we admire. We admired then uh at the start of open courseware and today now uh more than ever. Kathy Casserly is an adviser, strategic consultant, executive coach and a pioneer of our global OAR movement. Kathy led the creation and launch of Hulet's initial hundred million dollar uh portfolio in open education and later served as CEO and president of Creative Commons. her uh work at and with the Carnegie Foundation, the Aspen Institute, Open Stacks at Rice University, Open Education Global, and across the uh philanthropy and technology sectors have influenced countless leaders um and organizations advancing openness today and uh forever. Peter Baldwin is research professor of history at UCLA, global distinguished professor at NYU, and chair of Arcadia, the Londonbased philanthropy that he founded together with his wife, Lisbet Rousing. Peter chairs the digital committee of the New York Public Libraries Board of Trustees, serves on the Wikipdia Endowment Board, and is the author of, among other books, Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All. This is an MIT Press book. Uh, everybody should go out and get an MIT Press book today, but it's also available open access, and we'll return to this. Arcadia supports open access to knowledge as one of its priorities and has been a catalyst of expanding open at MIT because open learning as we've heard throughout today is not alone here. uh the MIT press, the MIT libraries, the MIT Museum, the MIT Media Lab all play a role in this uh enterprise of what Hal Abson or maybe TS Elliott has called daring to disturb the universe. TJ Bliss is a former uh program officer at the William and Flora Hulet Foundation where he led the foundation's strategy for open education uh resources. He uh co-developed the costs, outcomes, uses and perceptions research framework which is foundational to open education resource uh research throughout the world and he was instrumental in developing the UNESCO recommendation on OEER. Dr. Bliss is the associate commissioner of academic affairs for the Utah system of higher education and a clinical assistant professor in education leadership at the University of Idaho. Dr. Bliss can also read Toltoy and Dosetski in the original Russian which no doubt increases the likelihood that as a human being he will understand the world in all of its fullness and actually find fulfillment. Uh please join me in uh welcoming them again to this celebration. — Well, that was really good. So, um, uh, we're describing our part of the MIT OCW conversation as one about the essential role that philanthropy has played and continues to play in driving forward a global movement centered on access, equity, and the belief that knowledge should be a public good. We should start with some origin stories and questions for Kathy Casserly here in particular. I have with me the original funding proposals to the Huelet and the Melon Foundations. Um, some signature blocks are still blank and unsigned in these documents. So, the whole enterprise might be invalid or whatever, but um, we'll ignore that right now. It says in one of these from 2001 the following o from 2001 OCW clearly has the potential to fulfill the educational promise of the worldwide web. The OCW concept will help transform the way colleges and universities define their role in disseminating knowledge, their outreach to new audiences uh around the world and their institutional and faculty engagement with the internet as a vehicle for service not just for profit. 2001 — all the MIT schools, all the MIT departments. I mean, what on earth were you thinking when you decided to fund this kind of thing? — I was thinking back to that document and I recall it was a 20-page document and there are a few 20page documents that got through the Ullet Foundation with a $50 million grant and this was one of them. And we did have Melon Foundation as a partner. We trusted Melon Foundation and Bill Bowen and Ira Fuse who were key leaders there. And um I don't know what we were thinking, but we knew it was the right big idea. And I think at Ullet it was or I I'd say for the ecosystem it was what I call synergy or synchronicity kind of meets preparation meets opportunity and meets timing. — The internet was changing the world. We knew something had to happen at Ullet. Bill Ullet made his money on innovation. — The ULIT program Mike Smith was new. He was leading the program. He had just joined and he wanted to bring the changes in the internet into the education. Where could ULIP make a significant difference? And so we be that was the questions we began to ponder. And so when this big idea came through, when Chuck Vesque sold it to Ullet in his magnificent way that he does and did, — it has had this lasting legacy. And because Ullet had a partner in Melon, I think there was just this synergy that was created at that moment in time where um the Ullet board understood it right away. Uh Bill Ullet's son understood it right away because he was he loved music and gave a lot of his scores away. President Paul Breast who was part of the film understood it right away. And so it was a big risk worth taking and it's had its amazing halo effect. So that's where it began. — Thank you. In in some of the renewal proposals that we also reviewed from the mid from the mids um funding proposals to Hulet, we came across this kind of statistic. Um TJ, I'll turn to you with this one. um among educators 85% feel so this is a few years into the experiment 85% feel that OCW has helped them improve their courses 88% of students and 90% of self-arners say OCW helps them learn 88% of MIT students um so given your work in education and more generally in access to knowledge your uh board affiliations and more. As a funer, as a professor, do you buy it? — So, I'm going to start by saying former funer. — Former funer. — I don't have any money. — I've got to go. I was — Yeah. — Okay. — Uh yeah, I do. — All right. — I I buy it. And it's interesting you asked that because my origin story started with David Wy, who I has been mentioned a couple times. Um, and I didn't believe a word he said about this in the first class I took with him, which was grant writing. — Uh, but he sent me to a meeting with some Gates money that he had from the Gates Foundation — in the other Cambridge — across the pond, which was the OCW meeting. It was the now OE Global, but at that time it was my first introduction to anything OEER, open education at all. I didn't do that work. I was a grad student and that's where I met many people. Some of them are in this room — today. Um people who literally changed my life and I sat and listened to them talk about this kind of data. That was 2012. — Yeah. Because they went the next week and that was the UNESCO declaration on OAR in 2012. That's where everyone was going and all that buzz around getting that going. I had no idea what was going on. uh no idea what I was about to be a part of. And as I've moved through this space, as I spent time at Huelet and got to really meet incredible people and stand on the shoulders of giants, not just in the funding community, but the people you saw in the film, the people that are still in this room who believe in these ideals around what knowledge can do for the world and what the technologies that we have can do to expand access to that knowledge in the world. Uh it's incredible. And what I've heard today, what's been very heartening is not just about access. — When you listen to faculty talk about it, students talk about it, they talk about how this has changed the way they think about teaching. And this has been a tough nut to crack. Access to knowledge is an easier nut to crack because of the technology that we have, because distribution is essentially free, because we can work through the copyright issues and the legal things, right? The barriers to access. But getting faculty to change what they do, as someone once said, it's harder to change a history course than it is to change the course of history. — It's funny. — So, but the point is that it's very difficult to get any teacher to change what they do. And what we've heard today, the evidence is that is that once you engage in this kind of work, then you see that there's something more that you can do. And then something I was working on at Huelet and where I went after that was to the Wiki Education Foundation because they were doing something in the space of open pedagogy that really nobody else was doing — in that way at that scale with that kind of impact. But it was literally changing how students learn and how teachers teach because of open knowledge, creation of knowledge in the classroom, which often you don't get to until you're in a place like this and you can work with someone who's creating knowledge all the time. How do you do that at a community college in the middle of the West in the United States? Right? So that's I believe those stats. I believe them because I've seen them, but I think this open pedagogy piece is the nut to crack now. — So to you again, like uh how important is it for people to be able to have the ability to adapt MIT originated content in the work that they do as teachers and learners. It's essential that they be able to do it. Will everyone do it? Absolutely not. Will some people just use it for as is? Yes. Well, most people probably use it as is. Is that value? 100%. It's amazing value at scale. But those that do take the time and energy and hopefully some of them get paid to do that labor. More and more are getting paid to do that kind of labor. uh the more value that it can bring the value can be amplified exponentially as people adapt that content. We heard one example just translating it for heaven's sakes just translating it the Ukraine I we speak Russian together been to Ukraine Sophia's story is absolutely incredible to me as I think about what's going on there and that first attempt — this work to translate it and to hear that being taught in Ukrainian was incredible — we can do more of that and it needs to be done not just by MIT by anybody out there MIT is not going to translate everything into every single dialect and language that's out there but it can be done now with AI quickly And that permission to do that remains ever more it's more essential today than it was ever before. — Thank you. Um Peter, I work at MIT but I'm not very good at math. I know that your the Arcadia has given $1 billion. like I can't even get there in my imagination, but north of1 billion dollars to support um uh culture, uh open access, um an extraordinary variety of things that align with a lot of what we're speaking about today. Does this work um I mean I shouldn't say does it. How does this work resonate with Arcadia's interests and your uh own? — How does the work that we're talking about here? — Yes. — Well, look, we're just simple funders. So, — we need — sure we need people who have good ideas. Um we stand no taller than the people on whose necks we stand on whose shoulders ride. Yeah, — other people stand on our necks, right? — Take it as you will. Funders do that too sometimes. Um, — so we're only as good as the people we work with. And for us, it's, you know, we've been doing open access for 15 years or so. It's been a steep learning curve. We naively entered the field thinking that, oh, research libraries at universities, they must be precisely the people to partner with because they're interested in knowledge. They're interested in getting it out. They're interested in education and enlightenment. Well, it turns out they're not really because they see their content, — yeah, — if one may call it that, right? — Those August volumes and Widner and elsewhere with such a blean term. They see what they have as sort of the crown jewels. This is a way of recruiting faculty. If you give it away, they don't have it anymore. So, the research libraries are not actually very good partners. Other libraries are MIT library and press of course are exceptional in this. I believe we had an entire panel on this recently so I don't need to go to that. I could skip lightly over that. — No, but feel free to you know how exceptional we are. — This kind of thing. — I I'll come back and lube you up later on as well. — It's them it's — uh we've worked a great deal with the Internet Archive. uh their concept of controlled digital lending is extremely yes persuasive. Uh it's also of course illegal and that's what got them into trouble. We paid a big chunk of their legal bills uh to get them out of the hole that they dug themselves into but now they seem to be out and sort of continuing. But the institution that we've had the most success with and I'd like to sing their praises as well. Not just this has been a sort of love fest for MIT. May I introduce an outsider as into — I don't think so — into the mix. tough. — Okay. — And that is the New York public. — Uh the New York Public Library is of course, you know, not only the biggest actual public library system in the country. I think if it's not the biggest, it's the second biggest, something like that, depending on I don't really know what the metrics and how they measure this. — But it's also, you know, one of the top five research collections in the country. So they both they do it and they want to get it out the door. uh they want research and they want enlightenment and they want to uh spread it. So they are in a sense they're very different from other research libraries. I mean what distinguishes the New York public from others is you know they don't really have any vested interests that want to hamster their holdings. you know, they don't have any faculty, students, they don't have any university administrators, and above all, librarians sitting there, you know, shouting Gollum like mine, precious, all mine, and you know, keeping the content to themselves. Um, and so they've been very open to this idea of making open access a reality. And the first way they we've been doing it is um a sort of a slightly mis restrained version of controlled digital lending along the lines of the internet archive except that we decided we needed to ask for permission and we didn't want to get sued and we have deeper pockets than Brewster Kale and therefore we definitely don't want to get sued. — Um but we also quickly discovered that that was a that couldn't really be scaled. — If you have to go and ask everyone for permission, you know, then it gets to be a very slow process. And then fortuitously in the meantime, of course, AI happened. And so we thought surely this has to be in the mix as well. — And what we're now doing, and I don't want to be too specific about it because it's a work in progress, but we're sort of on the verge of having something uh to show um the world is we've we we're harnessing LLMs to work over a very controlled database, — which is basically the public domain stuff that we've gotten back from Google. Um so about a million and a half books. So it's you know nice reasonable collection to start on and um the LLMs that we're using they present the data they don't summarize it because of the controlled data because of the because they present results not summarizing them. We think that the hallucination issue has been if not solved then at least uh attained and the idea is that you can essentially read in a very different way because you put in your questions and you get back a great deal of information that's very precise and then because of the exception that paragraph 108 in the copyright log affords libraries — we can also deliver a fair amount of it you know directly to the — to the reader. So we're hoping that this is going to sort of allow us to harness AI in on behalf of open access and to make an enormous and ideally growing corpus of material available not just to New York public library card holders but you know anyone who can get into the system — and that could be something that's worth emulating at other — one might hope so — and when will that be available to — well this remains on the glitches being ironed out but I we're sort of within striking distance of having something to show. — That's great. — So, uh we like to open learning. We say at open learning uh using open as a verb. We like to open learning. — So, if we for Peter also but uh you know for the panel um — to interrogate a little bit uh the importance of freeing knowledge generally today. Um you know uh um Peter in Athena Unbound: Why and how scholarly knowledge should be free uh for all available from the MIT press. Did I say that? Um also in an open access edition. You write um the vested interests of rights holders are open access's biggest hurdle 2023. Um and some scientific publishers in all their trickery have quote adopted the open access mantra chanting it all the way to the bank. Um still valid as critiques of uh boundaries to open access. I guess what I'm asking is what are the forces that seem to be closing access to knowledge or trying to keep it closed or trying their darnness whether these are state interests whether these are commercial business interests um you know especially now uh as someone has put it uh especially now that the truth is so often paywalled but so many lies are free. Well, oddly enough, in my neck of the woods, which is to say the humanities and the social sciences, those who most jealously guard their rights are the authors. And in this case, those authors who are scholars. — Mhm. — Who think that they have a product that they can market effectively people who think that they might be able to write a bestseller or at least something that's going to generate some level of royalties for them. And so, especially in my own field, historians, you know, historians — actually do occasionally write bestsellers. You know if you write a good book about the civil war it might actually sell into four and possibly five figures. If you write one in you know compl lit probably not. So there are certain fields that you know more with the illusion uh still remains you know viable that one might come up with something. I find that they are often the most jealous guardians whereas the scientists — there it seems to be strictly an economic problem. There are interests that are making money off of open access in a way that probably is goes beyond the pale and needs to be reigned in made more affordable. But the scientists themselves have no illusion of ever profiting from their output from their content. And it's only the publishers who are sort of in it. Whereas, you know, for the humanities and social science people, the authors and the publishers still collude. — Can I just pick up on a point? — Yes, please. Panel. — So, it's fascinating because in the origin of MIT open courseware to get the first five faculty I don't know Steve are you here Bill Dick you Shagura to get the first five faculty they weren't lining up they were not afraid if I open up my classroom will anyone come to class — it was like Ann Margalus I'm pulling teeth all that work that the OCW does of like making it easy for faculty. Just hand me your notes. We'll give it back to you. We'll tape you. And like it's 25 years later, it's the same story. Now, once that happened, the first five or 10 got released and those faculty became rock stars. Is Gilbert Strand still here? His linear algebra course got disseminated around the world so quickly. — Within 24 hours, someone found an error in like chapter six of his courses, the 24th page. and he's like who has read this from Vietnam so quickly right so like so when they became rock stars then everyone became signing up right so the incentive structures are really interesting and of course now it's the you know we were we're still here it's 25 years later but there were so many blockages along the way which MIT open course were figured out and with the faculty and with the going back to the values and with Chuck vest always saying that it was around about improving teaching and learning at MIT. — That's part of what he sold the story to. So, we can improve it at our university and we can show other universities could do the same. And so, it's just a it's interesting to hear — the same story uh two decades later. — It's odd that in in academia that money should count more than publicity. You would think that the po point of this is besides of course the obvious thing that we all want knowledge to be spread and that's I mean that's sort of that goes without saying that's the whole market reading card version of what academia sells itself as but um you would think that publicity would be something that our colleagues would crave much more than a few dribbles of royalty. Mhm. — I mean, it is the fear that someone in some obscure province somewhere is making money selling a CD of your content somehow and you're not getting a piece of it. Um TJ, you want — Yeah. So um the the thing we're thinking about right now in the higher education space governance curriculum uh all the institutions that I'm uh involved with uh being an administrator of administrators so watch out for me — um — if you're a faculty member but uh reminds me of a comment that Barbara Chow made and Barbara was the director of the education portfolio uh at the Hillet Foundation when I was there. She came to me one day and she said, "TJ, what if tomorrow all the publishers just decide to give away all their content at a much reduced price, probably not free, but what if they just lowered their prices overnight? — Would we still need to be doing this work in open? — So good. " — And I had to think about that for a little bit. And that my response to her was, well, there there's more to this than just affordability. And that's a very American kind of context because of the structures that we have. However, that has happened recently in the last two years with what's known as inclusive access and equitable access or flat fee models at our institutions or first day access. The publishers are ostensibly are claiming to solve the very problems that OEER has been yammering about solving for a while, which is first day access and affordability by offering their content in a Netflix model where you pay very little and it can be rolled into your funding um method like PEL grants and scholarships and so it's part of tuition and students don't really feel it all these things. And when the question is what's threatening OAR, what we're seeing right now is a disincentivization for faculty to even engage in this work because in their minds, a lot of them, it's been solved. The biggest problem has been solved for their students. — What they don't realize, which I've learned just yesterday, I was sitting in a meeting like this with OEAR advocates and workers and others in the West, — is that the publishers aren't making good on their promises. They've lowered the price for a minute. it's going to go back up. But even the first day access programs aren't there. One student didn't get their books for six weeks in their first day access program. And so as a policy maker, which is the role I'm in now, I'm thinking how can we establish policies and guidelines and frameworks and protections against the damage that this is actually doing to open knowledge and to the halo effect, which I hope becomes more than a halo effect. becomes the real effect of changing the educational practice. Well, if faculty feel like, "Oh, my students all get their textbooks for free. They don't have to pay for them now. " The incentive to actually engage in this is going away at the institutions that have adopted these models. That's what we're seeing right now. And it's I think that's the saddest thing for me. And I get why I'm not faulting the publishers for it, by the way. I know there's some might. like they are incentivized but by they do everything exactly the way that they're going to do it because of the incentives that are there, the business model, the thing that they're doing. Like I'm surprised it took so long to get there, but I don't know that we are responding in a way yet that is addressing those challenges headon. I'm trying in my role — through policy that we hope to have through the door on in June uh to put some barriers on this but I still don't know how to solve for the disincentivization to actually adopt OAR to change your pedagogy to care about student affordability when they think the problem is solved and er and it's erroneous because it's not solved for the students it still costs them it's now just a piling into their debt so it's being hidden from them that's what's worrisome to me. — Can I add a point? — Yes, please. — So, I think one of the challenges is, and I think you've given a nod to this already, is that we can't spend all our energy defending ourselves. We have to get proactive. And so, we have a lot of organizations who are open in lots of different ways. And they're still siloed in, you know, there are consortiums coming together. Open Ed Global is certainly one a consortium of universities that spun out of the interest of universities from around the world who wanted to replicate the MIT model. But MIT Open Courseware sits here, Khan Academy sits here, creative common sits over here, the licensing structure, New York public library, right? We have this huge public commons and we haven't yet created a governance structure to protect the commons, whatever that means. Exactly. But being individual, we're now 25 years in. We now have the content. How do we create some governance structure so we have the sustainability so we can build together and jointly and not doing it all alone? Because there's certainly going to be more power together to create that kind of system. — I wonder whether the whole process of finding data andor reading as we in the HSS call it um isn't going to be radically changed by AI. I go back a bit to the our experience at the New York uh public because once stuff is up there and it when it's in the cloud it doesn't much matter how it got to be in the cloud — whether published by a publisher or uploaded by you — and the LLMs have pled it — right — then it's going to be equally available to anyone who asks the right question — and the difference will be that between those people who are asking questions that are factually nubble like where they want to know something specific and can get a specific answer will which they'll find in all kinds of surprising places thanks to the LLMs and those who want to have a sort of more general question what is the meaning of life how did the civil war start whatever something like that — for whom of course there will be so many answers it'll be useless um and so that won't do them um very much good but the the sort of the distinction between the publish um then curate or the curate then publish models that you know often get discussed I think we'll have largely evaporated because once it's up there, regardless of how it got up there, it'll be available to everyone. And I think the AI is going to sort of challenge us to develop a whole new method of assimilating data and reading them has been the case. — A governance structure to protect the commons. just um uh um hope one hopes that this panel will also leave time for question and answer discussion because this is a unique opportunity to really um have that kind of conversation. But last week, our friend uh and supporter from the Sloan Foundation uh was up on campus and we were talking about where his program popularizing the public understanding of science will go. We uh we work with YouTube. Um uh as Kurt and others have mentioned, perhaps we're the largest educational presence there. Um, and we're now, you know, given the new attention economy, as Rebecca Saxs mentioned, uh, that we have now, we're trying to understand, you know, Instagram and Tik Tok, but a little wearily given who owns them and what their real perhaps, uh, purpose is. So who you know uh with a nod to our Hulet Foundation supported open 2030 working group a number of members are here members we've hosted from other universities Wikipedia the internet archive creative commons who might our natural allies be um uh a number of them have already perhaps been mentioned here but — what do you what do That — is that directed at me? — Yes, it is. Actually, I'm trans I'm not translating. — You won't translate. Can you get auto translated on YouTube? — Yeah. What do you think? — What does the panel think? Who might our natural allies be? If we are creating a governance structure to protect the commons, who if we might, if we think about it, — with whom are we marching? So Tony Aay who used to run who developed BBC's I player or whatever it's called um and then worked at the New York public as their digital chiefly is in the process of trying to put together something he calls public. com — which is to create a entire new whatever that's called when you have a do you know new layer of the internet um that will in effect be a kind of sort of good housekeeping seal of approval You don't necessarily have to change your thing to do. Sorry, not public. com. Is of course what it's called. — Being confused in old age. Yeah. Thank you. Sorry for being — vague. Right. I got the right. Um and the idea is you don't necessarily have to change your own domain name to public, but you could be routed through. Public and you will have to meet certain criteria to be allowed to do that. but that these criteria will help you sort the wheat from the chaff in the blooming buzzing mess that is today's internet. So it's an attempt in a sense to curate the internet. — I like that. I mean — we thought early about creating curating systems to give signals of approval around open educational content and not just in open courseware but we funded a lot of projects. Open University UK, — Rice University, Carnegie Melon, — UNESCO, a lot of projects. And so, but how could quality content be found? Because sometimes there was junk. I call it junk and gems, right? Like a lot of content was being created. What had the signal of approval? You had this whole publishing process here that made sure the quality of MIT open courseware was solid. But there were lots of different nuggets of content being shared and when was it most useful to whom and the curation systems are really diff were difficult at that time. We tried a few things we tried something with witchy you may not even know that and like they worked to a point but then things were changing so fast or not everyone was participating. So I like this idea about public and I think a lot of it is how you get higher ed institutions to join in a consortium way how you get others to join in early. I mean MIT joined in early around sharing their courseware but it was difficult to get another USbased — university to follow MIT because MIT's brand was so strong. — We use that for a halo effect to create the open educational resources movement. We did that intentionally. We used Carnegie Melon intentionally. We used UNESCO intentionally. — But that also because of the competitiveness other R1's didn't necessarily wanted to do it or they in their own way. So when you create something like this. public, how do we make sure everyone joins in and it's just not a few and the content is for community college students and for the rural schools and for students of all, you know, abilities. And so how do we make sure that happens? And so I just having gone through this journey for 25 years, what are the things that we could have maybe done differently had we known? But we did the best we could at the time we were at. But now since we have people still leading this, how do we pass a baton and make sure people are really thinking about that inclusiveness um and bringing all players to the table. So I and just to one other nod, Ullet did a few great things as they built the open educational resources portfolio. One is they never wanted to take credit. I mean that came out of the board. We don't need our name on anything. We just want it to happen. I would be like, but right now we need it because this is very early and usually actually has a signal, but we're very flexible with other funders and if a funder wanted to do the research piece, we would use our money for something else if they wanted to do the technology. So, we brought a lot of different funders in and that also and that brought all their networks in and that then makes things expand and scale much faster. So, that was really interesting along the way. So I don't have an answer to your question beyond this uh except but I do have a question — for your question. — Okay. — And that is what is what should be the role of government? — Yes. — In governing the commons. And I think about this and this is from Kathy who taught me all about this as we walked around the Boston Commons. The original commons. The idea like the foundational idea of what a commons is right here. were in the birthplace uh at least in the in the United States and um — I don't know what the role of government should be in this. I do know that governments have a very strong interest in it whether it's an economic interest — and a lot of governments see open as a way to save money at the governmental level but they also you know they are the purveyors of public goods — right I mean like that is the that is one of the roles of I say democratic governments truly democratic governments — um de democracy is threatened so therefore the commons are threatened I would say where you don't have strong democracy, you don't have a common understanding of the idea of public good. I even had this conversation — uh just this week with someone who asked a question, what is a public good? — How do we answer that? I didn't know that. I thought I was thought that was an assumed — right — thing. So I I guess I'm posing that question back to you, Peter, or anyone else that wants to tackle it is what role should governments play in protecting and governing the commons and should they have a role or is this going to be done without the governments? Is this some is this a bunch of nonprofit organizations and philanthropy and aren't constrained by governments and bureaucracies that need to be doing this or is there is it all of us? — Well, we we need a panel. Can this day go till tomorrow? Actually, we because we need a panel on, you know, government's role um in protecting the commons or in promoting education as a public good, which used to be self evident. We may need to wait um for what Rebecca Saxs was calling a new government um uh to explore that further. But bringing all the and perhaps in the question and answer uh discussion section today we can um have a vigorous uh chat about some of that. But bringing all the players to the table, I know that in the o early uh proposals to Hulet and Melon, um there was uh a remarkable level of attention being paid to creating a movement not just to funding — uh um MIT, and I withdraw the word just, not just funding MIT, but um to creating a movement. And so the um open education consortium that Steve Carson and other people here had such a major role to play and um OE global which is coming up and MIT is hosting that in October uh also bringing all the players or many of the players to the table. Uh I wonder how we can go about encouraging the players to come philanthropy to support their uh movement in this direction. Um it's a key question that hasn't died at all since 2001. Quite perhaps the o opposite. — Well, and something we haven't even solved yet is how to get the open communities to work collaboratively together in a in a real it's still siloed. the free and open source software folks are different than the open education folks. There's a tiny little bit of overlap, right? There even open is siloed and I don't know like even at Huelet I was I didn't do much work on open access. That's that's another we just don't have the we can focus on this thing open educational resources and open access is a different it's a different strategy. It's a different funding line. And it's a different foundation that's going to do that yours right largely right and there are a few organizations Nicole Allen's here from Spark that even there you have two people one's on open access and one's on OEER right and they're they've tried to have conferences together and they've gone — they've been interesting let's say but we haven't even found a way to do that so I'm just the challenges are real here even in the open space whether it's open science open culture open knowledge — open education They're still distinct. — They're still distinct — disciplines or groups or — communities maybe is the word. — So protecting the commons which encapsulates all of them. — Yeah, that's a different — is I guess I'm just highlighting it's a big challenge. It's there's no easy solution to this. — Well, I think each part of the ecosystem had to grow and become stable enough as its own entity for then it to begin to create the network among them. It was the same with organizations in the o open education space, right? It was like, you know, Open University UK and Michig, you know, in Michigan was doing work and um UNESCO then we had work with VJ in India and like they're all coming to me and I'm like you guys got to talk to each other because I'm only one person, right? And now like look at this amazing ecosystem. The thing on the funders too is that I think philanthropy is there for a while but they're not there forever. 25 years ago, the idea was that we would help kickstart this initiative at MIT, but that MIT would build it into its institutional line. It would become so valuable to the organization. We know alumni still love it. We know students who are coming to MIT. We've heard the stories who take the courses who then can join in. So there's a lot of benefits that MIT has experienced as a part of this and that there are real costs and those real costs have to be borne and they can't be born by philanthropy forever. And so that's where I think governments come in. Nicole Allen I mean she led a lot of the work in California $15 million going to the open initiative in California. So what about if every state did that or many states that did that right? So there can be some different replication. So I think we have to think about governments and when we talk about governments we don't have to talk just about the United States. There are governments around the world who are supporting this work in important ways too. — Yeah. But be careful what you wish for when it comes to government. Really look at the debate over whether or not social media should be reigned in. I mean is there any agreement other than that something needs to be done on that or safe harbors and fair use? When I talk to Europeans, it is very common among even bian liberals that you know safe harbor is an absolutely atrocious thing and must be shut down immediately. And fair use is you know wildly uh something that goes against author's moral and other interests. And you know the reason why the system in this country even today is more flexible, more open is precisely because of these things like fair use and safe harbors that the Europeans have basically shut down. So — too much government meddling is also a problem. — So I I've been thinking about this week. Um I was talking with our chief financial officer um about this who's new to this topic. He might be listening. So I hope I don't get in trouble with this comment. Um but he he challenged I said it's always been my um belief that this the solution for sustainability the business model for open education is government. that actually I attribute that to Wayne Macintosh in New Zealand — that he said that all the time the business model the sustainability model for open education needs to be the public it needs to be government because that's where the public funds are. Um but this you know this person who is been in public finance for a long time challenged that a little bit by saying — there are so many competing interests that are so heavy especially here in the United States he just mentioned Medicaid that it's even threatening higher education generally public higher education is threatened as it as existentially threatened we've seen a flip in public funding for that and tuition it's becoming privatized basically right which means people are valuing it less as a public good and think And with that things like this, even though the ROI is incredible, you can show it, it's threatened. And so his argument was there's also just an incalculable amount of new money and philanthropy out there. That was his argument. And maybe I'm throwing this out as a challenge to say there are lots of people with lots of money who could fund all of this pretty easily without even really feeling it. when where although governments play in big numbers, the competition for that is so fierce that it that it's hard. Now, we've seen it happen, right? We've seen it happen in California and New York and Texas and — Idaho. Yay, I was there when that happened. Um, — we've seen it happen, but is it sustainable? What what comes to compete with it? And I don't know the answer. I don't know that I buy it or not because I spent years trying to work and get more funders involved, more of private philanthropy involved in this space and with some success, but always not always indirectly. Oh, this fits what we really care about is this problem and OAR helps or open education helps, but no one came in and said this is the thing we're going to fund like Hullet did or like Arcadia has done. There's very few of them — and you're kind of looking at them right now in a way. So — I'm not giving any hope here. I'm sorry. I'm this is not a — brutal um true uh truth u um to look a little further into the future. Um last question from this side anyway. Um so you know what should we be thinking about and what should we all be doing in the months and the years ahead? uh hopefully panel audience um in those 2001 proposals again we wrote for example about the power of translation we expect OCW we said to be of particular value for developing countries MIT will be pleased we wrote uh to have other universities translate OCW into many other languages uh we've begun to explore how we might work with Wikipedia to advance Demetrius Bertimus' vision of reaching a billion learners and more and uh you know working more effectively with the commons um to bring uh to campus a Wikipedian and residents a Wikipdian uh Wikipedian at large uh who joined us today actually he's here with us um what should we be thinking about um I keep looking at the screen and thinking we have 25 minutes left But that's just because it says 25 years. It hasn't changed 20. So we don't have 25 minutes left. But um uh you know one thing, two things if our panel would be so kind as to listen to that prompt. — Here's what wakes me in a dead sweat in the middle of the night. Who's going to be stewarding digital content? It's used to be the libraries that took care of content. The Library of Congress in this country the ultimate steward. — Um, libraries don't own their content anymore. They just lease it from the publishers. — We'd be fools to think the publishers are going to be stewards of it. When they go belly up, it disappears. When the content goes into the public domain, are the publishers the ones who are going to keep it on their servers and maintaining it? If not them, then who? Right now we have you know various organizations like locks and clocks and portico and things like that third party organizations that are the backup systems for the digital content but you know is that really what we're willing to rely on as the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress if so — you know that's a bit fishy it seems to me. Um, — so I worry a lot about who's actually going to be responsible for maintaining digital content, especially when it goes into the public domain. — The cold sweat question for the other panelists. — I don't wake up in a cold sweat. — That's a figure of speech. I think — you live in California. — California. But um I mean when I think about so for the movement has had so many challenging periods. — Yeah. — There's been the rest in peace blogs of OAR. There's been you know the there's the publishers we're you know we're going to take you out. There's been people who have always been not hopeful and I do believe there's enough champions. I do believe the work is situated now in enough places around the world and institutions that this will go on but it needs to evolve. So how and where AI will evolve with open education resources is a big one — and that will make the translation ability to take the content and create it in ways that are most useful for different learners is going to be extraordinary and this is a moment in time when that can happen. And tied to that, the human element is still so critically important as has been raised throughout the day today. And this will actually I think free the humans up to do what they do best is to flip the classroom to teach in different ways to work with certain students to re-imagine teaching and learning like we had hoped from the very beginning because the inspiration was not to free content. the inspiration was to improve teaching and learning for people around the globe to have that access to knowledge and that's the piece that I think we're really getting to. So, um remain hopeful as I have been for the past 25 years. — Well, and here's some good news. I can say that I do know that a focus on improving teaching and learning is is growing across higher education in America. Organizations like AQ, the American Conference on Undergraduate Educators, I think that's what that stands for. Um they're they offer now certificates that faculty can get in teaching and learning. And yes, Huelet funded them for a minute to do some things around OAR. The reality is if more and more faculty are being expected to focus on their pedagogy and their teaching and learning, there's going to be a place for open education, open access, scholarship, all of it. Um, so that's good news, right? That's happening. The other thing that gives me hope is that I think the one of the original strategies, and Kathy can tell me if I'm wrong on this, is that the idea was also to institutionalize this approach, right? And MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has done that. That's why we're here. I mean, it is institute. It is institutionalized. And it's also the whole idea around open education, OAR, open access has been institutionalized in so many places around the world. But I can tell you I just came from a meeting yesterday where there were people from Saipan and Guam and all the other western states and territories and many of them had the title OAR librarian or OAR director or OAR something — in this meeting that I was in with James Guppet Grossclag — right — that you quoted today. I texted him and told him that you quoted open this meeting. He said he can't be here but he's in that meeting with his colleagues there focused on this. That gives me a ton of hope that we're already seeing it institutionalized. Can that go away? Sure. Is it likely once it's institutionalized? No, because that's the thing that higher ed's the best at is just maintaining its status quo. So, we've got OEAR as partly as a status quo and scholarships happening too. So, that there are challenges ahead. Surely, there are all these things we've talked about, but I'm also hopeful because what I've seen is that it's here. So, now what do we do with it? How do we move it forward? How do we make sure every president, every provost, every dean, every department chair and then as many faculty as we can understand that it's here and that what what's possible with open that that's I think the next frontier at least I'm speaking as a higher education as a government person now. But that's what I want to do. — Oh, that's right. You're a government person. — I'm a government person. That's why I — I see. I remember. Um it's fascinating to hear AI uh creep in again and again into our discussions in New York Public Library, the future of teaching uh and learning. Um and I'm sure we're going to hear more about that in the session that follows. Uh but this is a um session on uh you know essentially uh philanthropy's role resource development. I would be remiss if I didn't take a second to um say that our RD team, Ivon Ang and Deian Nigen and Laura White and the venerable and everpresent Tom Smith uh um have done so much to make this conversation during this panel and this whole uh um day uh um uh happen. Um and I just want to Um today's discussion reminds us that philanthropy does more than fund projects. It sees movements, nurtures experimentation, and ensures that the world's knowledge can be shared more freely and equitably. Um so please join me and my RD colleagues uh um in thanking these visionaries from the world of philanthropy. They're standing Thank you. I love what you're doing. — So, in a few minutes, we'll hear from open learning leadership on the future of MIT open education. Um, hope you'll join us for the final session of the day. Thank you. Thank you very much. for questions. We are not Wonderful. hey, hey. Heat. N. Oh, ah. Hey. Hey. Heat. Hey, hey. Do Oh yeah. Yeah, which was very good. probably know but she did a Q& A with the audience I will go will That's an extra. — Is this thing on? — Yes, we just got the thumbs up. — Okay, welcome back everyone. We've had a wonderful day so far. Welcome to those of you who are just joining us online, maybe just tuning in. We've come to our last session. It's a really special one focused on the future of MIT open learning, MIT open education. Once again, I'm Sarah Hansen, the assistant director of open education innovation, and I'm with Dmitri Spartimus and Kurt Newton. And for those of you just tuning in now, Dimmitri is the vice pro vice provost for open learning at MIT as well as a professor and associate dean at Sloan School of Management. Kurt Newton is the director of MIT open courseware. It's an honor to engage both of you in this conversation about the future and I hope that all of you will leave feeling inspired um for the future. I always like to start with a personal question that helps everyone here get to know you as a person. And one of the leading goals for our organization is reaching 1 billion learners within 10 years. And uh Dimmitri, I'd like to start with you and ask you why you are passionate about that. Where did that come from? You didn't just wake up one day and decide that's the goal. — Yeah. Well, most of my colleagues at MIT think I'm dreaming. On the other hand, we heard in the morning that OCW has reached half a billion. It seems a factor of two maybe in 10 years as opposed to 25 years. It's not a huge reach to be honest. When I have the 1 billion, I did not know exactly the numbers. But look, MIT is an institution by its history that it has always put high aspirations uh to convince and my colleagues to participate in such a movement. I can tell you if I suppose I tell you I would like to do a 100 million people who OCW has you know it's not exciting enough. So that's the other part but I also believe as an objective for the world you know MIT as an institution educates 11,000 students some of one in a million people roughly very smart kids in 41 years I have educated maybe 15,000 um of the students over 40 years uh aspiring to educate one in eight in the world especially in uh areas you know uh if you look at Africa for example only 10% of the population goes to university to aspire to educate you know a sizable portion of the rest of the 90% and I just picked one um one particular continent which the demographics are exponentiating I think it's a I thought it was a worthy objective that can uh mobilize our u our community of faculty students and open learning That's so interesting that a key aspect for you is motivating faculty and our team. It seems like you went to the Sloan School of Management maybe. — Well, I have some experience about success or failures. I mean, part of my background, thank god I have this background otherwise I wouldn't be doing I wouldn't be successful. I mean no successful aspiring to be successful in this job is that you know I have serial I have been a serial entrepreneur my life. Yeah. And I have found the key characteristic of success and failure is to motivate the people to do it as a force. — Uh and it has been my effort the last year and a half. My colleagues uh I suspect have observed that I try to decrease the silos we have to move as a force. Uh we have made progress but there is room to go. — Thank you Kurt. How about you? Why is it personally important to you to reach 1 billion learners? — Um well, I feel a very deep sort of intrinsic motivation, okay, to the some of the values that we've talked about throughout this session about — um the incredible force that knowledge as a public good can be. Um, you know, and I've lived for I've been here almost the full 25 years, 22 years here at Open Courseware. Just seeing, you know, year by year how that progress builds and I can see in a sense that it is in reach with a, you know, with a few more things which I think we'll get into over the course of this hour that I think we'll open that up. um you know and I see how um we we've had this tremendous impact but that impact through really reaching a relatively small percentage especially in certain countries around the world and so just a huge opportunity I think is very motivating. — Yeah. — Interesting. Thank you for bringing in your personal values your personal motivations. So if we extend that to the organization, Kurt, thinking about open courseware in particular, what core values of open courseware should we hold on to as we move through the next 25 years? — Yeah. Um a few, you know, a few things that really are top of mind for me there. um the commitment to share broadly from across you know all possible disciplines from MIT feels really important you know there's a I think there's a risk if we allow ourselves to be too focused on just the say top 10 topics we lose the richness that we've heard from some of our you know learners you know that we and educators that we've heard from today um you know, Hanata speaking about urban studies for instance, you know, probably won't be a top 10 topic, but there's a there's something really special that's been enabled by MIT by open courseware's commitment to sharing from across the full curriculum that I think is really important to carry forward. Um, another one, you know, as you know, these new tools, AI tools come in increasingly into our hands is to keep the proper focus on humans as being really fundamentally important and essential and working collaboratively with other humans in this work and, you know, continuing to figure out the right way to do that. Uh, I think is another core value that we want to carry forward. Yeah. — And similarly, what new needs, Dimmitri, have emerged in global education that you think we need to be paying attention to going forward? — Well, um, everybody and their brother is talking about AI. Yeah, it would be I mean I'm an AI guy. — I know. So I it's not exactly uh it has occurred to me that AI and as you perhaps know we have launched uh already it's now past tense launched yeah — we have launched what I call universal AI the idea to educate universal is not a random title is to educate in a in an area that is growing fantastically uh everybody in the world we aspire in AI I in the use of AI to improve lives, careers, trajectories of people. Uh but in addition, uh there are other forces. Um if you think about um universities, universities are structured vertically. We have civil engineering number one, mechanical engineering, this is MIT has numbers for those of you who don't know. Number two, I'm I graduate from mathematics course 18 and so forth. But that's not how the world is organized. The world is organized horizontally. There is problems of health, of climate. If you look at the major problems of the world, energy and so forth. Uh they are not organized neatly in a vertical way. So I think there is an opportunity in my opinion to educate the world and especially the young people in a way the problems come because you know common problems don't come with labels problems come as they are and it's up to us to organize knowledge so that's the second opportunity first AI use broadly uh third uh and it was actually my dream when I joined actually was one of the most important dreams I had and I would not have expected to be so close to realizing it. Personalized education, traditional university education is not personalized. What we do today is definitely not personalized. We say the same thing. It is absorbed by you the same, you know, might be differently, but we say the same things. But uh the opportunity in online education is to personalize the and we know for there's significant research to suggest that uh uh people do not understand the same way. They have different values. they have different absorption rates and so forth. I think the dream of personalized education has been a dream of mine for decades before. I thought maybe in five 10 years I will be able to do something in that. Uh we're about to launch personalized education in the summer. So uh based on some gen AI research we're doing. So that's an that's a third fourth area that I think needs adaptation. Um the traditional unit of uh of knowledge is classes. We have semester courses at MIT. Our are our OCW courses. You know, we export what we do at I'm not criticizing. I'm saying I'm doing it myself by the way. So uh it is uh but that's not how especially younger people do not absorb this way. They they absorb knowledge in shorter horizons. In fact, my friend uh Kurt educated me on this. I'm a good student, Kurt. So, and I check with my students, they absorb in different ways. So, I think trying to organize knowledge in a certain chunks also, it's easier to revise uh you know, if you expect our my colleagues at my team, me included, to revise 50% of a class that change in AI 26 lecture, 50% 13, good luck. I mean, they will it will never happen. But if you have a module of four or five to change two lectures, it's feasible. I mean, and I have evidence on that because we already have been doing it. So, uh, for fifth, uh, — I'm having a hard time keeping track of all these. I'm like mentally repeating them in my head, but go ahead. — What's Yeah, I got it. Personalized learning. Modularized learning. And then there was another one, but I forget it. — The complication is I forgot it, too. So we I it was interesting that um when we were reading uh I think uh Peter read the original OCW proposal. It talked about translations. I've never read the original proposal — but it talked about translations. Is this correct Peter? — Yeah. — Well, it was my hope to create translations. — Mhm. — But it hasn't happened. It was the scope but I haven't seen it in open learning. Well, we are launching this month translation in 12 languages. Yeah. — So, uh translations are critical in my opinion. You have countries like Japan that 80% of the people don't speak uh English. So, if you have content fantastic content that is only in English, I mean you limit. But if you have content in the local language, adaptable, personalized and so forth, you have a higher chance of adopting. So it is indeed uh you know I have few things more to say but otherwise if you are losing it I'm certain you are not the only one. Uh — no the other one you mentioned was horizontal learning that Yeah. Thank you. Um — good student is good. — Yeah. Um — very important horizontal learning. — Yeah. uh and it's it informs later on we'll talk about our strategy. It informs our strategy. — Yes. — Namely, you know, AI the first thing we launched is it's definitely cuts across all 26 departments we have at the mat and all the centers is it's you know I don't know anyone who is not even affected climate is our next objective. energy as you know they cut across yeah — you know uh health name it there's a in my opinion organ you know if you especially with the young people whom I have as you can tell I'm not indifferent to my young friends yes — so um I do feel that uh educating in the world they will face — in the with the same orientation I think it goes a long way and I actually argued to our to Sally that we should also do uh residentially not only online that is it's our in my obl it is our obligation to also teach our own students — yeah so can we back up for a second for the people who are maybe just joining us online or are new to MIT open learning can you explain what universal learning is like we yeah go ahead — that's a good that's appropriate yes so what is universal learning so let me start with universal AI because it's in our past. You know, for those of you that have an MIT account, MITDU account and you you register on the left side on learn MITDU, you can see universal AI. It has 16 modules of uh the fundamentals and at the moment six vertical modules. — So altogether 22 about 30 faculty have participated in this effort and there are another 18 cooking another 18 verticals. So what does it mean? The first collection of modules uh is four modules on the fundamentals of programming and machine learning. — Okay. — Uh Annabelle, I don't know if Anna Bell's here is was a significant participant in the first uh form. This content by the way is free. — Okay. — Second set of modules. It is uh the fundamentals of deep learning. Um there are three modules. Each module has of the order of four to five lectures altogether 15 to seven I forget the exact number lectures. Next one is prescriptive AI decision making with AI. Next one is the is uh large language models and generative AI. Uh next modules are uh is the ethics of AI — and the future of work. Um and then the from a vertical perspective we have uh AI and energy, AI and health, AI and um law AI and you know AI plus X basically the X and so forth that's sort of the fir in other words we teach people not at the level of graduate level you know um see if we want if you are genuinely trying to reach a billion learners you have to teach things in a way that not an MIT student only understands but the world and which means high quality content applicationoriented that speaks to problems of the world with an applied orientation and quite more accessible. So that's the foundational piece and then if somebody wants to deepen their understanding, you would like to understand what is the implication of AI in law — of which they subsided or health or biology and so forth. That's the idea of that part. So this is on AI. So then we have a new effort that um two of my colleagues lead Chris Rab and Desire Plata. I think Chris is in the room. I think it was in the morning. — Mhm. um is to do similar things on climate and energy foundational I mean climate is a significant existential threat of our times especially important for the people who have another 70 80 years to live. So um it has similar educating people in the fundamentals and then verticals. Next one is biology. We call it universal biology. Fourth one is universal health. the first two biology, climate and energy. We are hoping to have our first modules in September and hopefully the end. Uh so I would like to encourage you to uh especially many of you have MIT and by the way even if you don't you can uh register we are actually launched March 30th uh to individuals not only institutions and there are two ways we go about it. The first way is to try to reach uh individuals We now have the platform. I'm very excited about this platform. We are moving uh all of OCW or FM of FMITX uh our professional education I hope June 30 July 30th um to the new learn platform. So in a sense we are and controlling our destiny. We are controlling quality. We are controlling uh um you know all of our innovations will be there. We we are going to create we are creating translations in end of April. We are the first guinea pig so to speak would be universal AI but rest assured I will make certain that uh OCW gets it MI all of our efforts benefit from that. So that's the another advantage of fully controlling your destiny and everything is on based on open edex which is a platform and I asked my colleagues in engineering where should I bet I I'm not very knowledgeable in this area you know they proposed to me uh um open edex this is where we are putting so it's a it's in a sense MIT if you think about it fundamentally uh MIT is going solo on uh providing knowledge controlling quality and so forth but this is only the beginning there is a phase two and phase three I actually believe MIT while it's a great institution doesn't have the totality of knowledge so we first start MIT leading with universal learning second phase which is actually happening as we speak institutions from other countries other in the United States but different than MIT develop their own content because everything lands on learn their students in phase two have access. We have no control on what they put. But phase three, some of the best of this material, we put it, we embed it and then we offer it to the world as well. In other words, the collective intelligence of the world is um is capable of addressing of doing that. Um so we don't restrict but there is one difference. We control quality. I mean in my opinion edx cosera and so forth have exceptional content and extremely poor content that's my opinion of course you might not agree but uh but if you look at the totality I mean some of them I don't know if it's even correct to tell the truth forget about pedagogically so that's sort of the overall strategy I mean people can also ask questions afterwards you know I like interacting with the audience as you I will get us there. — Okay, great. I'm sorry I spent more time. I apologize. — You are allowed. It's okay. — All right. — Um, so one thing you got at Dimmitri is this idea of others contributing and knowledge as a public good. Yeah. Which is so interesting and that speaks so much Kurt to the ethos of OCW. And I'm wondering how you're envisioning that OCW's foundational beliefs might be represented within universal learning either as it is now or has it as it might be in the future. — Yeah, I think it's a really important thing that we continue to be committed to. Um, you know, one of the great things that's being enabled by MIT Learn is having all of these lifelong learning materials available for people in one place. And so you have a kind of a seamless discovery experience. Um, Demetri, you talked, you know, about personalized learning. I like to think about what OCW has is, you know, personal personalizable, — right, materials. it's put out there in a wide openen form so you can grab as little or as much as you want. We need enhanced tools which we are working on to make it easier to do so. But I feel like um building on that foundation that we've got with those OCW materials, you know, shared openly and freely with the world, you know, provides a really important foundation that, you know, will be, you know, uh kind of unleashing in new ways through the learn platform. — Yeah. — Can I make a comment? — So I'd like to give a concrete example how OCW material could be utilized great — in uh in the new world — as we envision it. new world hasn't fully arrived. So in the morning John Gruber was here uh very distinguished person in economics who has exceptional material and um so the way I would envision it is that which is sort of starting at the moment slowly is that you take you can take parts of this strong material uh modularize it make it smaller add other things to it so create what I call uh universal economics — and then other people participate as well. So you provide more of more global educational system supported with translations with personalized learning with customiz with all of we have launched for example a tutor called ask team MIT reversed not this is not ask dim — so um and this is uh supporting every aspect so there are roundtrip influences you can take OCW material adopt it and you can take some of the innovative things we have done and distribute it to everything else open learning does. That's an in my opinion an advantage where all of these great progress we have made on multiple arenas we can work together as opposed to siloed to move to the future. — Yeah. Could I um lean into another aspect of the public good? It's not knowledge is a public good for everyone who speaks English, right? Um, and having done this work for 25 years, we also have the benefit of trying some stuff and it worked for a while and then it didn't and we composted it and we're going to, you know, we prepared the soil for doing it new, right? We had actually a really vibrant translations program in the late as early teens. Yeah. — Which was very manually done, handone. I think we had over well over a thousand OCW courses translated into like 10 different languages. But over time that became unsustainable and so we composted it right the soil is rich right the interest is really deeply there we see in the usage statistics how much the opportunity would be and now with you know the AI tools that are being brought now to bear we've crossed the tipping point they're good enough showing up on learn to really kind of unleash the access to this knowledge as a public good for all languages — we now sit on the cusp And I'm incredibly excited about that for the next years to come. — And I can tell you I know Greek. — Yes, — it's my native language. We checked Greek 10 million Greeks. It's not like it's a gigantic, but I would like to check in something I understand that it's of good quality. — Yes. — A+. — Wow. — And I can say I didn't do anything AI and you know some of my students, our engineering team has worked on it. — The quality is high. — Mhm. I mean perfection is outside the human condition anyway but uh it is high quality translations. I would I have evidence on this because we I tried experimentally in two high schools by the way in Greece about 80 people in one 70 people in the other comments are very positive. — Yeah, this is a really exciting future. Um — I definitely hope so. — I know. I'm ready. I'm ready for it. a billionaire. We better start. — We got to get working. Um so in this new future, you talked about desiloing and working together as a force to meet our goal of reaching 1 billion learners — and we have done you know UI is a reality. — 50 people across open learning collaborating on this just to say it's not a pipe dream only. — No, you're doing it. A+. It's happening. Um, — you don't know if I get an A. A minus. I have rooms to grow. So, — yeah. Okay. A minus. — Um, Kurt, we think and Dana is in the audience. Yeah. Hi, Dana Doyle. So we think a lot about the future of MIT open education because we've really taken to heart what you're saying about like why are why try to be open courseware owls like these separate entities when we could be more powerful together. So Kurt could you speak a little bit to our emerging vision for what MIT open education might become or the processes we're going through? Yeah, I think it's a really exciting opportunity here that we get to um reconsider, you know, broadly the things that are happening and definitely sustain the things that are really key, but then kind of restructure and take another run at it. Um, you know, we're in a different world than we were, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago. things are shifting and so what we've alluded to for instance in this like um modularized and then wellsupported learning journeys is one that I think is really important and — to show up for that with the open education ethos of making sure that it's freely available you know to everyone around the world regardless of institutional affiliation or financial situation as a starting point is really key you know Um, it's I don't know if you uh remember taking a trip and navigating with paper maps and if you were a AAA member, you could get a trip tick, right? And they would do the routing for you. You know, I feel like, you know, from a learning pathway perspective or on the cusp of getting ready to uh take the leap with a functional like GPS enabled, just hit the road and figure it out and get the verted, hit that coffee shop, you'll still get there. You don't have to like have the manually created curated tptic to tell you where you're going. Again, some of these emerging technologies, the ability to personalize these learning journeys based on the infrastructure, the personaliz personalizable because I haven't said that very often yet. Personalizable materials that we've got in open education will really make this possible. So, I'm super excited about that. — I would also like to comment the following. you know to reach a billion learners — 95 97% of those should be free — that is I haven't yet lost it I don't believe that uh because even if we get uh 97% of people like it would be naive of me to believe that uh people in subaran Africa would would be willing or even able to pay even $5 for this but but but uh on the other hand we need to be sustainable that is uh you know perhaps you don't know but uh the MI the MIT administration announced and I actually agree with that it's not against my wishes that um we had a subsidy of about $20 million from the institution. This will go to zero in four years. So therefore for us to be able to support these visions and of you know uh we better have the ma the vast majority in open education but it cannot be only in open education because we will not exist. So um so realistically speaking we organized open learning to open education that Dana and Kurt are leading and then we have a workforce learning and then universal learning because some of it is free not is like intersecting both of them. Mhm. — So uh and I believe that uh we can achieve both um uh both sustainability as well as uh significant number of learners. So that's uh that's an significant move forward. And speaking about strategy, I would like to acknowledge Andrea here from Wikipedia. You know, Wikipedia uh you heard from Kurt or Peter was it uh is uh you know it is my personal go-to place to learn something information from something. Okay, I've reached four five billion learners. So I would you know Wikipedia in my opinion and Andrea agrees because I checked yesterday has some weaknesses had fantastic success. this is truly an A+ but there is you know areas that they don't you know they don't have uh characteristics they don't actually teach you know they they translate information it's not multimedia it's primarily text we are hoping in fact we have started the project together to uh combine forces you know the gentleman uh in the previous talked about collaboration between open forces so to speak. — Yeah. — I it is my aspiration anyway that this collaboration will help both institutions and most importantly the world because you know our learners can have u significant information from Wikipedia and Wikipedia learners can also get significant information from it. So stay tuned but uh that's a significant bet. So to know that it's significant bet whoever comes to my office I have a list of things when we accomplish I race it keep it is number one saw it yesterday so which means I will only erase it when I think we succeeded. — Oh wow. Okay. — So you haven't been to my K sees it and he sits there he's right — you don't like to just cross them out so you can remember your accomplishments. No, because I then uh will focus on the new thing. Then I have then I keep space. I will replace it. I had translations. — Yes, that's I erased it. — Okay. I have so much to learn from you. — Well, — okay. — You come to my office. Okay. — Not only Zoom. — Yeah. Okay. — Um Kurt, let's look into the future. — Yeah. — I'm not going to ask you to look 25 years out because we're just going to be holograms by then. Thank you. — Yeah. — So 5 years from now, — 10 5 to 10 is my horizon. — Okay. Yeah. That's Yes. Fair. — So 5 to 10 years from now, what are the opportunities for Open Courseware's legacy to live on, but maybe be dynamic and change and become something new? — Yeah. Um I'm going to channel a couple things from that video, that wonderful video we saw this morning about — that was a plus. True. Truly. Yes. Um there was something about that moment 2001ish with some of the forces that were at play right that opened up the op a kind of a special opportunity somewhat in that moment right of that moment to with a simple brilliant brave leap disrupt the universe as you will right — and I look at what's going on with AI and it's absolely absolutely certainly going to disrupt itself our kind of relationship with knowledge and how you know how we work with each other and all of that. It feels like what we've glimpsed with the emergence of chat GPT recently and some of this new agentic AI is like wow the first mosaic web browser and Alta Visa and Yahoo search and maybe some pets. com stuff is in there too distracting us but like sometime over the next I'll say five years — I'm looking for some way that history rhymes with what happened 25 years ago what's the opening ing the refrigerator or on the exercise bike sudden just like rupture of of conception that like what's the brilliant thing to drop in there? It's like simple and can like galvanize this new movement for this frankly really at the moment pretty confusing world that we're heading into. That's what I'm looking for and that we play continue to play a really important role in that. — Yeah. That's what I hope for. I have a prediction on this. — Oh, good. — Universal learning supported uh by AI where the entirety of the world contributes. — I have bet the house on that. — I have a little question about that. — Please. And I don't even like that I'm asking it, but like how do you protect the MIT brand if everyone is contributing? — Well, see, you know, because everybody would remember that this started at MIT. You see, I don't believe, you know, I started the morning saying I love this institution. It's true. I have a deep affection to it and its people and students but I definitely don't believe that we are the only people in the world that can have exciting thoughts exciting. So I believe smart organizations utilize the world. If you look at uh the the winning companies of today, they somehow manage to engage the world. For example, Google uses the entire internet to learn and so forth. — Yeah. — It's not just you know they have an algorithm but the knowledge base. So you know in the end of the day we if we succeed in reaching a billion learners with this initiative and so forth everybody will remember it's don't forget learn everything runs on learn MIT edu — we have bet the house on that so there might be Stanford content there might be university of uh you know Lima content but in the end of the day — it runs on MIT on things that that's my susp my bet anyway. That's helpful. Chris, did you want to add? — Yeah, I want to pick up on that a little bit. Um, this is in the spirit definitely of kind of radical disruptions in the universe. Uh, — you channel a provocation from my friend the brilliant thinker Bio Akamalaf. Uh, he gave this talk at the United the UNESCO digital learning summit this past fall. um where some of his experiences have him thinking that what we're heading towards actually is a big reset and perhaps a re frankly a really useful one about the very concept of authorship of ideas. Right? when this incredible new species that we've created out of our knowledge kind of gets in the middle there, maybe there's a sort of letting go of the concepts of ownership and authorship that get very imshed with things like brands. And I don't know how this is going to play out, but um I feel like there's momentum that's leading us in this direction, right? that's going to be provocative in some really interesting ways, you know. So, we have to have the right way of holding this. — Yeah. — But if you look at the scientific experience, I write papers with my colleague from Amsterdam Dan Hertok. I write papers and books with my colleague in Germany and uh we work it's a very intern the scientific endeavor is a very much a collaboration endeavor right 100 years ago it's the single scientist and so we engage our students and so forth why not in education actually universal AI has you know admittedly they were visiting professors at MIT but we have a visitor from Greece a visitor from the Netherlands a visitor from University of Seattle. I mean they are all MIT related but and 1 plus 1 is bigger than two. I mean you know you can't tell I mean the so I actually believe that uh you know the key objective is to impact the world positively everything is on learn MIT will get a s and I would like also to also share with the audience a personal story of Jack vest whom I was a big fan of. Jack felt that uh in his 12 years as a president uh his two most important uh contributions to the world was OCW — which is our MIT stories number two and three the the women faculty movement which I would like to preview. So we just saw this was the second story on MIT stories. We are working on number three. One of my colleagues uh Lana Scott is working on the matter. I'm hoping that Sally when her time to — to change will say well open learning — it's universal whatever we do and so forth would be a defining moment in her life. — Yeah that's really exciting. I definitely believe that I would succeed on that. — Yeah, you got to write Sally, Sally's dream on the top of your whiteboard. You know, — she knows already. We talked. — Okay, that's good. — Um, I feel like now would be a great time to open it up to questions in the audience because you've all said, you've both said — good — several provocative things that I think people might want to pick up on. — No questions. I was expecting you — couple of — the body language suggested. — Hello — number two there. — Um so I have a question. Um I totally believe in this modularization movement. But I also um know that um OCW users um like this opening of the MIT classroom and getting that feeling of being in the classroom. And I kind of I want to hear about how you see what happens in the classroom in the future. What how is the MIT classroom? What's happening in the classroom? — You mean residentially? residentially because that's one of the really I mean — well — they want modularization but they also want to be in the classroom with the students — well — I have a proposal to the MIT faculty to do something like that I believe the future of residential education is hybrid where I don't believe we should teach uh you know is uh Gil Strang here I saw him in the morning so suppose you want to learn algebra he has exceptionally good lectures really A++ you know uh but on the other hand if you want to understand uh you know for the residential experience you can utilize hybrid for learning the theories and so forth but if you want to solve a real world application at least for our residential students you can you can have a flip classroom Esther Dullo was talking about that — we already do that though — we do that and I would like to continue I think but in a larger I mean not many classes are hybrid I would say so I have a proposal to the you know I come from the Sloan school about doing the there's no hybrid degree at MIT none MIT does not give it would be a first of its kind so that would be a step in the right direction so uh to be honest given the financial pressures it would be I would say I would be surprised if the faculty who or in ordinary years they will say no I'm optimistic that first of all I think it's a good idea but in addition uh and if we do that we can actually educate more students at MIT you know uh 10x not you know that's my this is a bit more futuristic but we'll have evidence on this because there will be a it has to be an MIT vote we shall see I'm optimistic — yeah I'd like to respond briefly to that kind of on a different level which is I predict that our online learning materials will continue to show faculty teaching on chalkboards for many years to come right and we will continue to get questions. You guys still using chalk? Yeah, we are because it's a really valuable pedagogical approach. um those chalkboard lectures will become less, you know, 110 minutes long and more, you know, carved up or at least discoverable in smaller pieces, but we'll still be showing the chalkboard for many years and that sense of — Yeah. — I'm okay. I — I'm not a particularly good how do you call it? — Chalkboard instructor, — but I know others that are Wow. Yeah, — you have to have good handwriting. — Yeah. Yeah, I am excluded — and more patience — by definition. — Yeah. — Kathy. — Yeah. So, I'm wondering um when you talk about the universal education piece and then having MIT content there, but also allowing other universities or colleges to contribute. Do you think there's certain universities and colleges in the US that would be more likely and some less likely and the same outside the US? Um I'll tell you what I know for sure and then the other is conjecture. So you know we have started uh this phase two with the top engineering school in Greece. I have lots of connections there. So I have tried to connect with some of my colleagues at MIT to develop AI and drug design AI and uh you know satellite data and so forth. They told me yes but they haven't done anything. But the people in Greece actually both of them were MIT educated but they are professors there. They start doing it. I've seen what they have done. Excellent content. So the answer is definitely uh from universities abroad. And I have another one more. I have two examples. It's happening. whether Stanford would contribute in this effort where MIT is leading. I have my doubts but uh but I see why not uh you know multiple take for example a two-year college that uh they might have see we at MIT I don't think we have particular expertise in teaching two-year college students I mean I have none some of my colleagues have more some colleagues have more but if you have very dedicated exceptionally good instructors in the pedagogy they can contribute and if it's if we feel that is good for the Overall after all the fundamentals are more I would definitely see that I will see four-year college Williams College might be you know I do believe the major research universities in the beginning they will not if it becomes a global movement you never know but don't forget we control quality — and would you control who you invite in or would you allow people it — everybody can propose — okay that's everybody that they can propose. — But we have the judgment of whether — yes. Uh thank you. Uh this is a very interesting thing and I have sort of three pieces of — one at a time though. — Oh, I I'll do them. — I cannot keep them straight. That's the problem. You already observed I lost one. — Okay. Uh if you could say a few words then and take one of them. The PK through 12 initiative. much of the old school open learning is college level courses but uh you have a new initiative to address through to the earlier grades and uh so that's the first of three quick things — so how PK-12 look we already have some experience in high schools in Greece we have two of the major high schools and we are currently talking with the minister of education for all of the high schools of Greece and he has moved quite far this is high schools people that are 16 17 18 I have personally no experience of how to teach five, seven years old, 8 years old. I mean, I don't have and what we develop is not appropriate for that. But my colleagues in PK2 have some ideas. So, you know, would like to participate in this effort. My view is that the care and MIT how MIT is structured, it's quite likely that our content will be quite appropriate for 18, 17, 16. But then as you go lower ages you have to do different thing have to educate the educators. So uh my colleagues have good ideas on that. We are still developing our strategy. Stay tuned on that. — Okay. Well, and that ties into the second piece, which is uh it's one thing to learn from a lecture from courseware that's online, but there are a lot of things that hands-on materials are useful to support the learning process, particularly as you go down to younger students. — I completely agree with that. — And then the question is, how do you work in either a subscription model or the ability to purchase? And then for people with economic need, how do you arrange scholarships for things like the — kits? We hope philanthropy can help that is u we are also willing to offer you know my the primary objective is impact positive impact in the world financial sustainability constraint but it doesn't have to be everything we do has to be appropriately. So we have a reasonable strategy on that and um I am all right offering things for free uh assuming we are financially sustainable because I have to make certain you know imagine if on my hands uh open learning collapses that would be I have a pretty successful career at MIT but this would be remembered as a big failure of this fellow it's not in my intentions so I would like to do both — that all sounds great and that connects directly to the third piece which is I agree with you very much that a lot of what's out there is not worth the space that take takes up but and you have to keep the quality high but I think that is an opportunity for the MIT brand to be applied to things that came from elsewhere that are appropriate particularly in the realm of these kits and things like that are available to support — MIT brand will be there that is if something is on learnmdu within universal AI MIT started it and it's a module that a professor at uh Carnei Melon will develop which is actually this is cooking already uh but an individual I don't think it would be the brand would be diluted I really don't believe that unless we make mistakes on quality if we delude the brand but if we don't — have a question — yeah you speak about um positive impact worldwide. — Oh, sorry. Yeah, you speak about positive impact worldwide and practical applications of uh of the learning. Um there's a shortage of trades people. Um you know, what have you thought about that? And I give a personal anecdote. My refrigerator broke. I didn't know how to fix it. I went online. There is there's nothing about practical applications, fixing appliances, whatever. But on open courseware, I looked at the fluid dynamics portions of some courses and the electrical circuit board design so I could troubleshoot the refrigerator and those types of things. I also use it as a learning experience for my kids. But I'm thinking people in developing countries, it could be something that's, you know, necessary for them to survive. um it could be a path to uh get the financial security so then they can move on to the higher level education. So I just go ahead. — Yeah. Um I think you rais a really important point. You know the materials that we put out have a sort of an MIT frame on it, right? There's frequently a lot more theoretical grounding than the sort of typical trades person uh expectation would be. But one of the wonderful things about working in an ecosystem with others is we get to work with for instance schools and educators who do really understand how to do you know relevant education for people from a wide range of needs such as you know how to be the most awesome refrigeration repair person you can be you know so Sarah you've done stuff for instance you know building collaboration with community colleges who have a little bit more of a footprint in that direction maybe you care to share an aspect of that? — I mean, it's just really wonderful to see open education in action and to see our content adapted for different learners who then go on and do really powerful things with them. — Yeah, I'm glad to hear that you found some value in working on your refrigerator from open courseware. Yeah, — that's great. — Yeah. — Um, hi. So, uh, I was in the internet, so I've come live. I'm hybrid. Thank you. Sorry I couldn't be here earlier, but I just wanted to first share something and then I have a comment on something. The first one is just a really cool history point. I was lucky to be a young MIT corporation member when we launched OCW and when we hired Chuck Best who was extraordinary and I think the points you made about not only OCW but also the women's reports and getting more equality for like all of us in um but I want to share something that still relates to us that's deeper in history as it rhymes as you were talking about. Um, so in 1865 is the first year that MIT taught classes. And there's this super cool timeline that's on the wall if you kind of go down the infinite quarter and take a little right into building three. And in 1865 it says on February 20th free the first classes were held in the Merkantile building and it goes on and talks about more and LOL free courses began in the evenings year one um open to both men and women taught by MIT faculty under the opaces of lol you know and that's from an earlier time but just isn't it amazing to think of our early days the first faculty and that the threads of OCW were going to teach for free. Obviously, it wasn't digital. Uh so, you had to be in the Boston area, but everyone could join for free, which was amazing. And of course, MIT is a land grant uh university with all of our neighbors in other states. And so, we were part of that idea of everyone open learning for everybody and including the community. So, just a po cool point of history for everybody. And then the second point is just um I was lucky to be a student of Woody Flowers who was part of creating first robotics and a 207 and now we have Fab Labs. And so I'm just so excited about what you were talking about which is that the partnerships we can do. We don't have to make all these things but Carnegie made all these libraries. I think there's more libraries than McDonald's in the United States. So we can partner with them. And I just brought to share you know most kids they know about their phone uh but they don't know about the board inside. that's just a Raspberry Pi or they could do, you know, air quality sensors and these things. How do we get the physical and it just I've been so inspired by how OCW has been doing great work with partners and I think we can triple down on that because a lot of young people are also facing loneliness. And so a way to not be lonely is to be in a community. And so having not just the course, let's not have AI just teach us, let's have each other and have AI helping us, which also was in invented in a media lab way. — Um — anyway, so just a congrats to everybody on this. And then — No, but I would like to respond to something. — Yeah, I know. Just congrats to OCW. I'm so happy where we've come. But uh one of the areas that I think the plan I outlined does not address is the inerson connection. So I have been talking quite extensively actually to Neil Gersonfeld the Fab Labs. Fab Labs for those of you who don't know is uh a significant success. They have — there's massive number of Fab Labs. I've heard this and there's going to be a new Fab right here. Fab and Fab 26 this summer. All of the community from all over the world will be here at the end of July. — But I would like to connect with what we are doing. So we have a collaboration with Neil. I mean at the moment I haven't even discussed it with my colleague because I'm not convinced we will succeed but if we succeed I'll bring it. So uh the idea would be you know take AI for example you can build a model like that in which individual uh labs around the world can do things can meet themselves and so forth. They have some hybrid education where we at open learning teach courses and so forth, teach modules rather, but there will be an in-person component at but at the distributed level. Uh so we have some experiment with cyber security first and AI second. So we shall see. But if we succeed on that, believe me, I because I definitely believe that while I'm a big proponent of hybrid education, I also believe that the in person, the human component in education is nothing to laugh about. That is the loneliness aspect and so forth. I mean — opportunity — it's an opportunity but you know this is at the experiment you know I haven't even read write wrote it in my board because if I write it I only erase it if this might not it's an experiment in a way a silent experiment although it's not so silent today — that's right — we have time for one last question yes sir — hi so several studies from MIT have shown that using AI to supplement learning can sometimes actually hinder those like learning faculties in the brain. So my question is how do you decide how much AI is enough? — Well, I can tell you what our answer is. We have lounge as I mentioned. — I don't know why. — Yeah, I think the mic did not like what I was saying. So it says silence as a guy. — We can take a hint. — Okay. So we launched uh ask team which is a tutor system. A tutor system you see one of the issues with AI it's it gives sometimes wrong answers it hallucinates however ask team when it as a helper for problem does not hallucinate why because we give the answers the the we constructed the problem sets the answers are known AI knows that the only thing is that it does not reveal so you see what I Okay. — Well, we might be — we continue outside. — Thank you. Well, that was dramatic. Can I just very very briefly just very briefly — I just wanted to express my appreciation for the open learning especially the OCW team for pulling this together. Thank you to all of our collaborators in doing this work. We wouldn't be here without it. You know, too many to name, but again, I'm grateful for those of you who are here, those of you who have been online. — Thank you. And share what we do in the world. People don't know