MIT OpenCourseWare marks 50 million visitors

MIT said that 50 million visitors from around the world have accessed its online curriculum as of Dec. 1, with much of the traffic coming outside of North America.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology calls this initiative OpenCourseWare, and its www.ocw.mit.edu website currently offers 1,800 courses from the school's curriculum. Many of those courses are offered in such languages as Chinese, Spanish, and Persian.

According to MIT, its OpenCourseWare has also "inspired hundreds of other universities to share their course materials openly."

The MIT OpenCourseWare site, which launched in September 2002, appears to be rapidly gaining in popularity.

In a Globe guest column published in April, MIT president Susan Hockfield (right) wrote that as of then, 40 million people had visited the OpenCourseWare site.

"Perhaps the most powerful tool to offer people in the developing world is knowledge and analytical skills they can use to help themselves," she wrote. "Today, MIT's OpenCourseWare makes materials for virtually all of the institute's 1,800 courses available online, to anyone on earth, free."

To read that guest column in full, please click here. The Hockfield photo that appears with this post was taken from MIT's website.
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)