The online university

Professors at MIT have decided to teach physics in Thailand, organic chemistry in Azerbaijan, and modern poetry in Bangladesh--and that's just for starters. As part of the university's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, MIT wants to make every one of its 1,800 courses available for free to anyone in the world with an Internet connection by 2007. There are already more than 1,100 MIT courses online (ocw.mit.edu), which can be used by anybody for nonprofit purposes who agrees to properly cite the original author.

In the 1990s, many universities tried (mostly without success) to create for-profit online versions of their courses. But at a faculty meeting in the fall of 1999, MIT decided to go the other way and made 500 courses free for the taking by September 2003 for OCW's official launch. According to OCW spokesperson Jon Paul Potts, only about 10 of the university's 975 faculty members have declined to participate.

Potts calls the initiative "the democratization of information." But some students in developing countries, where textbooks and materials are often scarce, offer more vivid endorsements.

"I cannot find words to explain how I feel!" a computer science student in Bangladesh wrote to the OCW administrators after accessing the MIT courses. "[It's] like the feeling one feels when someone falls in love!"

Currently eight other universities are in discussions with MIT about how to publish their courses in the same manner, including Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Utah State, and Tufts, which went live with six courses in June.