New in the Library: MIT Opencourseware Materials
In November of 2005, at the Fourth Annual NSDL Meeting in Denver, Brandon Muramatsu Associate Director, Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL) at Utah State University, observed that “Opencourseware repositories represent a large, untapped source of high-quality digital learning resources for NSDL. Repositories, such as MIT OpenCourseWare or Utah State University OpenCourseWare, contain a number of STEM courses that could provide context for NSDL repositories of learning materials and vice versa.”

The first of these OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiatives, at MIT, has been incorporated into the NSDL broad collection at nsdl.org.

Quoting the MIT OCW about page “Our Story,” MIT OpenCourseWare is a remarkable story of an institution rallying around an ideal, and then delivering on the promise of that ideal. It is an ideal that flows from the MIT Faculty’s passionate belief in the MIT mission, based on the conviction that the open dissemination of knowledge and information can open new doors to the powerful benefits of education for humanity around the world.

In 1999, MIT Provost Robert A. Brown asked a committee of MIT faculty, students, and administrators to provide strategic guidance on how MIT should position itself in the distance/e-learning environment. The resulting recommendation–the idea of MIT OCW–is in line with MIT’s mission (to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century)and is true to MIT’s values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.

Today, MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based publication of the educational materials from the MIT faculty’s courses. This unique initiative enables the open sharing of the MIT faculty’s teaching materials with educators, enrolled students, and self-learners around the world. MIT OCW provides users with open access to the syllabi, lecture notes, course calendars, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, even a selection of video lectures, from 1550 MIT courses representing 34 departments and all five of MIT’s schools.”

The MIT OCW collection within NSDL consists of 910 descriptive records relevant to STEM courses offered at MIT.

TEACHERS: “Teach Engineering,” An NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar, April 10, 2007
Create more dynamic and interactive lessons through the real-world application of science and mathematics in your classroom! The NSDL Engineering Pathway provides a host of free K-12 lesson plans, hands-on activities, and interactive’s with detailed instructions and simple-to-follow ideas that demonstrate ways to develop your students’ problem solving and critical thinking skills. Engineers have a hand in designing, creating or modifying nearly everything we touch, wear, eat, see and hear. By introducing engineering into the K-12 classroom through hands-on, inquiry-based approaches, you connect science and math concepts to the everyday engineering that surrounds youth. This seminar will showcase resources and show participants the value of utilizing digital collections specifically designed to help teachers incorporate quality engineering content into traditional science and math curriculum. Register today!