Perhaps even fewer people know that MIT has a remarkable social conscience and allows the lectures, notes, and assignments of practically all its courses to be downloaded by anyone around the word for free! Why this is so is due to the MIT OpenCourse Ware (MIT OCW) and its founding is a wonderful story of MIT’s passionate belief in the mission that open dissemination of knowledge and information can open new avenues to the powerful benefits of education for humanity around the word.

It was in 1999 when MIT Provost Robert A. Brown tasked the MIT faculty, students, and administrators to provide strategic guidelines on how their institution should stand on the distance and e-learning environment. What resulted finally was the putting into fruition the ideal of advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship to best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century: The MIT OCW.

Today, MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based publication of the educational materials from the faculty’s courses. According to the official MIT webpage of the open course ware, "…the open sharing of the MIT faculty’s teaching materials with educators, enrolled students, and self-learners around the world, 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 1,400 MIT courses representing 34 departments and all five of MIT’s schools. The initiative will include materials from 1,800 courses by the year 2007." A truly marvelous philanthropic achievement in education, considering the fact that no registration is required! Of course, it is not a degree- or certificate-granting activity and does not provide access to MIT faculty members for consultations. This would already be asking for the moon.

To get a glimpse of the MIT OCW from the Sloan School of Management, here is a list of the areas of their dynamic curriculum: Accounting; Communication; Corporate Strategy and Policy; Finance; Health Care Management; History, Environment and Ethics; Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management; Information Technologies; International Management; Law; Leadership; Managerial Economics; Marketing; Operations Management; Operations Research/Statistics; Organizational Studies; System Dynamics; and Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Notice that it includes information technologies. Just out of curiosity, I downloaded their Course 15.561, Information Technology Essentials by Thomas Malone. It’s in PDF, quite extensive but almost unbelievably simple yet accurate. Had I known of this, I would have directed Course 15.561 to my youngest son who took a similar subject last year and I’m sure that his then absorbed concepts of information technology would have been a lot more, pardon the pun, informed.

On the other hand, if your field is electronics engineering, you’ll find the MIT OCW for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science to be a treasure-trove of excellent and highly authoritative references. For instance, the lecture notes in Dynamic Systems & Control by Munther Dahleh, Mohammed Dahleh, and George Verghese patiently supplies a lot of mathematical preparations that are indispensable for an indepth treatment of advanced topics in control systems.

So how do you hitch your learning wagon to an academic star, simply use Google or Yahoo and search for MIT OpenCourse Ware, and from thereon, you can navigate to your heart’s content.

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