November 2007 — News
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MIT Extends OpenCourseWare to High Schools
Five years after the initial pilot of MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative, it's now making its way into secondary education with the launch today of "Highlights for High School," which aims to bolster high school STEM education through free and open course materials, from complete curricula and syllabi to videos, lecture notes, and animations.
The OpenCourseWare initiative, announced in 2001 and piloted in 2002, is an effort of MIT to make courses freely available over the Web. The courses are not for the purpose of granting degrees or certificates; they're simply available for the benefit of the public. Five years after the initial pilot, which included 50 courses, the OpenCourseWare initiative now includes more than 1,800 courses.
A calculus course MIT's new Highlights for High School site, which includes lecture notes, samples from the textbook, sample problems, and exam questions
Highlights for High School--also known as OpenCourseWare Secondary Education, or OCW SE--is the first attempt on MIT's part to bring OCW to secondary education and the first step in a broader plan for secondary education that has been in development since 2006. The university estimated that, prior to the launch of Highlights for High School, some 10,000 teachers and 5,000 students were visiting MIT's OCW site each month, even though it had not been tailored specifically for high school use. Now, with the new site, there are thousands of resources designed just for high school teachers and students, including:
- 15,000 lecture notes;
- 1,800 syllabi;
- 2,600 videos, audio clips, and animations taken from actual MIT courses;
- 9,000 assignments; and
- 900 assessments.
